Works That Work Issue 6

WO R K S T H AT WO R K A M AGA Z I N E O F U N E X P E C T E D C R E AT I V I T Y I S S U E 6 , 2015

Forgotten ideas

Some ideas come back.

In the early days of the auto industry there was considerable concern over the dangers presented to pedestrians by the new machines (some of which could achieve speeds of up to 45 mph/72 kph!) as demonstrated by this early scooping device from the 1920s. Although manufacturers soon turned their focus to protecting the passengers, pedestrian safety has made a comeback in the external airbag in the recent

And some don’t.

This idea of a personal ‘lifeboat’, which received US patent protection in 1837, never caught on. The inventor John Macintosh claimed that it could be used ‘for the saving of persons and property, for the conveyance of troops,

Volvo V40. This year, one of the patents registered by Google for its self-driving car is for a bumper that includes impact-reducing air sacs that deploy in the event of a collision with a pedestrian.

Photo: Harris & Ewing, photographer, courtesy of The Library of Congress, and US patent 8985652 B1 courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.

baggage, and other articles across rivers, &c., and for various other useful purposes.’

Image courtesy of the US National Archives.

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Many magazines rush to cover the very latest news, racing to be the first to get a story out. Works That Work focuses instead on the impact of design, on the difference that creativity makes in users’ everyday lives, on a result that is impossible to describe until an idea has been tried; the newest ideas are unproven, often still unrealised, only the vision of change, not yet a reality. Relevance, not recentness, is what makes us sit up, take notice and start to wonder whether we are looking at a potential WTW story.

In this issue we investigate overlooked ideas. Perhaps in some ways they are failures, concepts that for various reasons never succeeded in making the transition to reality, in bringing the change their creators envisioned. Yet those failures can teach us as much as many successes, and perhaps even more. Unified Arabic, for example, is a proposal to simplify Arabic typography and potentially improve literacy levels in the Middle East. It has been rejected not on functional but political and cultural grounds, as is often the case with projects that involve fundamental societal changes. Another project, the World Passport, is a utopian attempt to erase all national borders. As usual, the issue comes with a mix of material that goes beyond its theme. Enjoy reading it, and do let me know what you thought.

— Peter Biľak

Works That Work, Issue 6, Autumn 2015 A Magazine of Unexpected Creativity published twice a year by Typotheque issn: 2214-0158 Edited by: Peter Biľak Editorial board: Jonah Goodman, Anne Miltenburg, Ed van Hinte Copy editing: Ted Whang Proofreading: Johanna Robinson Design: Atelier Carvalho Bernau Printing: Ando Den Haag Binding: Hexspoor Typeset in fonts Lava (designed by the editor) and Neutral (designed by the designers of the magazine) Special thanks to Johanna Biľak, and Christian Albrecht of Serum Network for converting Prokudin-Gorsky’s photos to CMYK, using his own colour conversion algorithm.

Printed on certified, environ­mentally friendly papers: Munken Polar 100 g/m2 and 250 g/m2 and T+O Gloss 130 g/m2.

Contact: Typotheque Zwaardstraat 16 2584 TX Den Haag The Netherlands editor@worksthatwork.com worksthatwork.com @worksthatwork Subscriptions: Exclusively online at worksthatwork.com/subscribe Contributions: We are always looking for new themes and articles in various forms. Please send us your proposals and something about yourself. Try to be as specific as possible: explain what the subject is and why you want to cover it.

Contributors this issue: Rick Beyer, filmmaker, Lexington Rob Cameron, journalist, Prague Giovanna Dunmall, writer, London Jonah Goodman, writer, Berlin Pete Guest, writer, London Christopher Herwig, photographer, Amman Jeroen Junte, journalist, Amsterdam Yara Khoury Nammour, designer, Beirut Tim Maly, writer, Cambridge Susan Merritt, designer, San Diego Anne Miltenburg, designer Grant Smith, photographer, London

Patronage: Help us make Works That Work.

Become a patron, and in return get copies of the magazine, your name listed in the magazine and on the website, and a personal thank you note. Your donation is tax deductible. Together we can make a great magazine. worksthatwork.com/patrons The following people helped to make Issue 6: Jo De Baerdemaeker Brian Scott/Boon Jason Dilworth Konrad Glogowski Wooseok Jang Frith Kerr, Studio Frith Jay Rutherford Astrid Stavro Clodagh Twomey Typefounding Typeheaven Dana Wooley Made and printed in the Netherlands.

In this issue:

Artefacts 4

by Peter Biľak, Susan Merritt, and Anne Miltenburg

Weapons of Mass Deception

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Text by Rick Beyer

Roadside Attractions

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Photography by Christopher Herwig, text by Peter Biľak

The idea of copyright is old, originating from the invention of the printing press and the subsequent concerns for the unregulated copying of books.

Typotheque holds copyright (© 2015) for this publication. If you’d like to reproduce anything from this magazine, please ask first. Sharing this magazine is very much encouraged, talking about it with friends very much appreciated.

Front cover: Four soldiers carrying a rubber tank during Operation Fortitude in 1944, part of the military deception employed by the Allied nations during the build-up to D-Day. Operation Fortitude helped convince the German military command that Allied forces would land at Pas de Calais instead of Normandy.

Photo: Roger Violet / Hollandse Hoogte Back cover: Photo by Patrick McDonald, WTW No.5 in Iceland. We invite our readers to take photos featuring WTW in unexpected environments. Every reader who submits a photo will receive a free copy of the magazine. w-t-w.co/q5l

Our Country is the World Text by Jeroen Junte

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What a Difference a School Can Make

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Text by Giovanna Dunmall, photography by Grant Smith

Cars That Run on Trees

Colour Photography Before Colour Photography

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by Peter Biľak and Kai Bernau

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Text by Jonah Goodman

Nutcrackers 74 Text and photography by Pete Guest

The Cobbler Who Conquered the World 48 Text by Rob Cameron

The Language of Colours Text by Tim Maly

Fighting Illiteracy With Typography Text by Yara Khoury Nammour

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79

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Artefacts Ideas given shape in ingenious ways by people across the world in order to solve problems big and small.

Collected by Peter Biľak, Susan Merritt, and Anne Miltenburg

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Interactive Cinema Czechoslovakia One Man and His House, the world’s first interactive movie, prem­iered at the Czechoslovak pavilion at EXPO’67, in Montreal. In it, Mr Novák, a somewhat hapless everyman, faces a series of increasingly dramatic dilemmas, and at each key moment, the film is stopped by a live narrator who asks viewers to use buttons built in to their seats to vote on what Mr Novák should do. The film became the hit of the expo, with people queuing for hours to see it and major American studios negotiating for the rights.

Since variations in the plot are handled by alternating between only two projectors, the audience’s influence is purely illusory, the storylines reconverging after each choice and inevitably ending with Novák’s house burning down. The 1971 Czechoslovak premiere was a great success, but the project was later shut down for political reasons. After the Velvet Revolution, Czech Television recreated the performance by broadcasting the parallel projections on channels 1 and 2, allowing viewers to create their own version of the story by choosing channels at the appropriate moments. PB

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A Perfect Fit The Netherlands

Hidden Mothers England

Before the era of ready-made, off-the-rack fashion that we live in today, each and every garment was custom made by a tailor who had carefully taken the customer’s measurements.

To a certain Mr Boerma, the clever manager of a dressmaking business in the remote north of the Netherlands, accelerating the speed of production was the key to increasing sales and profits. Around 1924, Mr Boerma realised that capturing his customers photographically would reduce the time spent measuring them. The magazine Leven reported enthusiastically on this innovation, announcing that a second shop would be opening soon in Amsterdam. Whether the cost of the photography or the time required to develop and print the photos was to blame is not known, but in fact Mr Boerma’s technology never made it to the big city. AM

From the advent of photography in the 1840s until around the 1920s, an age when painted portraits had been replaced by far quicker and cheaper photographs, middle-class parents were now able and eager to have their offspring immortalised using the fancy new technology. But while bouncy toddlers had been an exercise in patience for painters, they became an impossibility for early photographers, who depended on their models being as still as possible for as long as 30 seconds while the camera captured their images on wet collodion. To pacify the youngest infants, mothers were camouflaged in dark cloths or flowered drapes to match the backdrop, and posed like furniture. The results are startlingly spooky. Depending on where your sympathies lie, you might be shocked by the lumps of cloth which appear to be on the point of devouring toddlers, or alternately by the burqa-like effect which makes the mothers invisible in a time when women’s rights were still virtually non-existent. AM

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The Fifth Wheel USA

Winky Dink and You USA

The long, sleekly winged cars of the 1950s had one major drawback: it was hard to find sufficiently long parking spaces on streets that only allowed parallel parking. A Californian lumberjack named Brooks Walker came up with an invention that he hoped would catch the interest of car makers in Detroit: a fifth wheel. The driver would pull the front wheels to the curb, and lower the fifth wheel from its storage position inside the rear of the car. Set perpendicular to the vehicle’s length, it would lift the back wheels off the street, allowing the car to swing neatly into the parking space. Though the system seemed ingenious, the contraption took up almost the entire trunk, even in a car as large as a Cadillac, and the only car ever to use the system was the 1954 Packard Cavalier that Walker used to demo his invention. PB

The children’s television programme Winky Dink and You was ‘an early example of interactive TV’, according to Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft. The programme aired in the United States from 1953 to 1957 on the CBS television network. For 50¢ viewers could order the Winky Dink Television Game Kit that included magic crayons, an erasing glove, and a ‘magic window’, a transparent sheet of vinyl that stuck to the television screen by means of static electricity. During each episode, TV host Jack Barry invited viewers at home to ‘be a part of the programme’ by drawing on the magic window according to his instructions. Children added colourful elements to the black-and-white TV images and completed connect-the-dots drawings of props that supported the cartoon character Winky Dink and his dog Woofer in their adventures. Designer Harry Prichett and writer Edwin Wyckoff developed the programme, which aimed to encourage children’s interest in art and turn the new medium of television into an engaging tool. SM

Artefacts

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Page Turner France

Higher Productivity The Netherlands

For a country that even has a profession for the act of turning pages of music (le tourneur/la tourneuse de pages), the invention of a mechanical page turner must have been a shock.

But as every musician knows, turning your own pages in the middle of an important solo without interrupting your own performance is no small feat. Human page turners have their own downsides and can fail at critical moments. (It is not for nothing that chamber musicians say, ‘The soloist is only as good as the accompanist, and the accompanist is only as good as the page turner.’) A mechanical page turner operated by a foot pedal seemed an ideal solution, though live malfunctions quickly ended the machine’s optimistic launch. These days, the turning of pages is being handled by software engineers, who are experimenting with algorithms built in to music display software, enabling devices to listen to a live music performance, track the current position in the score, and slide the next page onto the screen with perfect timing. AM

If you have ever painted the walls of your home, you know that a large part of the time and energy investment is spent going up and down a ladder, and moving it further along after each stretch is done. Professional dry-wallers in Utrecht in the 1980s were fed up with this loss of productivity, and started working on stilts. Though perhaps slightly riskier than ladders, the stilts allowed them to work many times faster. A special crouching technique was developed for the lowest ends of the walls. AM

Inflatable dummy tanks and trucks set up near the Rhine River in Germany.

Attention to detail was critical. Bull­ dozers were used to make tank tracks

leading up to where the 93 lb (42 kg) inflatable dummies stood. Real artillery shells were tossed around fake guns.

‘We wanted to create the natural debris

that goes with faking something,’ said veteran Jack Masey. Photo courtesy of the US National Archives.

What use is an inflatable dummy tank in a very real war?

A lot, if the enemy believes that it’s real. The men of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops knew that their lives and the lives of thousands of others depended on tricks and tactics that often had to be improvised on the spot. w-t-w.co/3q2

Documentary filmmaker and author Rick Beyer loves quirky history stories. He was especially drawn to this one because it focuses on creativity being employed in the most unexpected fashion. He is the co-creator (with Elizabeth Sayles) of the book and documentary movie The Ghost Army of World War II.

WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION

A Ghost Army trooper paints an inflatable rubber tank modelled on an M-4 Sherman. The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, an elite force whose speciality was tactical deception,

was a matter of military secrecy until its declassification in 1996. Photo courtesy of the US National Archives.

Imagine being assigned to create a massive trompe l’oeil, and not just a painting, but a complex, 3-D, multimedia installation spread out over many kilometres. Imagine that it must convince an attentive and discerning audience to believe in and interact with something that is not really there. Further imagine that your workspace is in the middle of a war zone, and that thousands of lives depend on your success.

Also, imagine that next week you will be asked to do it again. That, in a nutshell, was the mission given to the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, also known as the Ghost Army, one of the most unusual units to serve in the United States Army during the Second World War. Included in its ranks were art students, sound engineers and Hollywood writers, and its ultimate goal was to use creativity, performance, and sleight of hand to save lives and help win the war.

By late 1943, the Second World War had been going on for four years, easily the biggest and most calamitous event in the history of humankind. Now the Allies were preparing an invasion of Europe that they hoped would be a devastating blow to Hitler’s Third Reich, but they understood that defeating the German Army would be a Herculean task and sought to give the attacking troops every possible advantage. Impressed by tactical British deception efforts in North Africa, they brainstormed how best to equip American armies with a deception capability.

Military deception is as old as war itself, but the idea the Allied planners came up with represented something new: a mobile, self-contained deception unit capable of staging multimedia illusions on demand. The 1,100 men in the unit were capable of simulating two full div­isions— up to 30,000 men—with all the tanks and

Weapons of Mass Deception

To complete the experience, the Ghost Army also used sonic deception, helped by engineers from Bell Labs. The team recorded sounds of various units onto a series of sound-effects records, each

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up to 30 minutes long. The sounds were recorded on state-of-the-art equipment, and then played back with powerful amplifiers and speakers that could be heard 15 miles (24 km) away. Wind speed

artillery that the real units might be expected to have. The illusion might discourage the enemy from exploiting a weak spot by making the site seem as if it was heavily defended, or could draw enemy troops away from where real American units were planning an attack.

Formed in January of 1944, and sent into action after D-Day, the Ghost Army went to war armed with three types of deception to fool the enemy: visual, sonic and radio. Visual deception was handled by the 603rd Camouflage Engineering Battalion. Originally formed to carry out large-scale camouflage, it was loaded with young artists, architects and designers who now turned their visual talents to a different kind of art. Many of them went on to become famous, among them minimalist painter Ellsworth Kelly, fashion designer Bill Blass, wildlife artist Arthur Singer, and photographer Art Kane. They were

and direction had to be factored in, so the army created a mobile weather station to accompany the sonic unit.

Photo courtesy of the US National Archives.

young unknowns at the time, working with their comrades to create convincing tableaus that could fool enemy reconnaissance planes.

To this purpose, they were equipped with hundreds of inflatable tanks, cannons, trucks, and even aeroplanes that could be used to create dummy tank formations, motor pools, and artillery batteries that looked like the real thing from the air. These decoys were not simply giant balloons, but consisted of a skeleton of inflatable tubes covered with rubberised canvas, an ingenious design which ensured that a single piece of shrapnel could not instantly deflate the entire dummy.

Working with inflatable tanks certainly had its quirky moments. Corporal Arthur Shilstone recalled being on guard duty one day when he halted two Frenchmen on bicycles who accidentally wandered past the perimeter. ‘They weren’t

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The Second World War has been the subject of countless books and movies, but only recently has information about this audacious and highly imaginative top-secret army unit been made public. Using dummy equipment, theatrical special effects and acting skills, they impersonated other US Army units to deceive the enemy.

looking at me, they were looking over my shoulder. And what they thought they saw was four GIs picking up a 40-ton Sherman tank and turning it around.’ Searching for an explanation, Shilstone finally told them, ‘The Americans are very strong.’

Sonic deception was carried out by the 3132 Signal Service Company. With the help of engineers from Bell Labs, they painstakingly recorded the sounds of armoured and infantry units onto a series of sound effects records that they brought to Europe. For each deception, the appropriate sounds were selected to create the needed sonic scenario, perhaps the sounds of a tank brigade moving up a hill, or soldiers digging in at night. These sounds were mixed onto stateof-the-art wire recorders (the predecessor to the tape recorder), and played back over powerful speakers that could be heard 15 miles (24 km) away. ‘We could crank the speakers up on the back of the half-track [a vehicle with wheels in front and caterpillar tracks in back] and play a program to the enemy all night, of us bringing equipment into the scene,’ recalled veteran John Walker. ‘We could make them believe that we were coming in with an armoured division.’

Radio deception was the job of the Signal Company, Special. A handpicked crew of highly skilled radio operators created phoney traffic nets, impersonating radio operators from real units. They learned the art of mimicking a tele­ graph operator’s style so that the enemy would never catch on that the real unit and its radio operator were long gone.

The three types of deception were used in concert so that each reinforced the others. All the men were told that they had to consider

themselves part of a travelling roadshow ready to perform at a moment’s notice. One week they might pretend to be the 75th Infantry Division, the next the 9th Armored Division. ‘We must remember that we are playing to a very critical and attentive radio, ground, and aerial audience,’ Ghost Army commander Colonel Harry Reeder explained to his officers. ‘They must all be convinced.’

The 23rd crossed over from England to France a few weeks after D-Day and conducted initial small-scale operations amid the hedgerows of Normandy. Moving through the French villages so recently occupied by the Germans, they saw an opportunity to improvise yet another way to sell their deceptions, targeting enemy spies that might have stayed behind. The idea bubbled up from the ranks and was eventually approved by the brass. They called it ‘special effects’ or ‘atmospherics’.

It was, in essence, a form of performance art designed to lend an extra degree of realism to their productions. They altered their uniforms and vehicle markings to those of whatever unit they were imitating that week. They drove their vehicles back and forth through local towns to create the illusion of heavy traffic. They visited cafés and spun fictitious stories for whatever spies lurked in the shadows. ‘We were turned loose in town,’ said John Jarvie, a corporal in the camouflage unit who went on to a career as an art director, ‘and told to go to the pub, order some omelettes, and talk loose.’ They even went so far as to create fake command posts, and against all Army regulations staffed them with counterfeit commanders. A colourful mission critique written by a young lieutenant named Frederick Fox

Weapons of Mass Deception

The Ghost Army unit simulated actual units deployed elsewhere by painting appropriate unit insignia on vehicles and creating patches for the different units they were impersonating. Soldiers

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wearing the patches of the unit being impersonated would appear, spilling phoney stories at cafĂŠs and other places where enemy agents were likely to see them. Corporal Jack Masey recalled that

his shirts were wrecked because he had sewn so many patches onto them.

Photo courtesy of the US National Archives.

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(who went on to become a Protestant minister and a White House aide) explained why such rule breaking was necessary. ‘Impersonation is our racket. If we can’t do a complete job, we might as well give up. You can’t portray a woman if bosoms are forbidden.’

Each Army division had a distinctive shoulder patch. To accurately impersonate the men of the 5th Armored, for instance, the deceivers had to wear 5th Armored patches. But deceptions had to be organised quickly in response to developments on the battlefield, and there wasn’t always time to obtain the necessary patches. A dozen men were assigned to the ‘factory section’ where they cranked out counterfeit patches made of tent canvas. One of the soldiers, Seymour Nussenbaum, recently estimated that they manufactured 40,000 of them during the war.

The United States Army entered the war without much in the way of deception tactics. ‘There were no manuals, no instructions, no guidance,’ wrote operations officer Colonel Clifford Simenson years later. In essence, the men of the unit had to learn their craft themselves, and do it under battlefield conditions. The unit’s first full-scale operation came in August 1944 when the French port city of Brest was under siege by the Allies, but still tenaciously held by German paratroopers. Three American divisions were assigned to take the city. The mission of the 23rd was to inflate the apparent size of the American forces by impersonating the 6th Armored Division in the hopes that it would help convince German General Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke to surrender. They were also trying to attract German anti-tank attention to the flanks to help clear the way for a possible American attack in the centre.

The unit divided into three fake, or, in military parlance, ’notional’, task forces. Two of them simulated tank battalions. Radio trucks were set up along the road from Normandy to Brest to set the stage for the deception by mimicking a large convoy traversing Brittany. At just the right moment, sound trucks pulled up to within 500 yards (460 m) of German lines to make it seem as if armoured units were arriving and making camp. More than fifty dummy tanks were set up, along with dummy jeeps and trucks. Camouflage nets were strung up, and the dummy tanks were supplemented with a handful of actual

WTW #6

light tanks placed in the most visible positions.

The men lit fires, pitched tents, and even hung laundry in the area where the fake tanks were set up to make the illusion complete.

Sergeant Bob Tompkins could see German observers keeping watch from a distant church tower, so he and the other men of the 603rd couldn’t just set up their dummies and walk away; they had to be ever watchful, especially in the hours before dawn. ‘During the night, the gun turrets would sag, and that’s a bad visual effect the next morning.’ Nor was the mission without danger, as the Germans could hardly be expected to let the arrival of the ‘6th Armored’ go unchallenged, and the men keeping vigil dug in to protect themselves against the frequent German shelling.

Special effects were ramped up as well; 6th Armored patches and vehicle markings were hastily created and applied. GIs from other units who heard the sounds of tanks moving in during the night were delighted the next morning to see soldiers who were apparently from the 6th. ‘We pulled into that area,’ said Jarvie, ‘and the guys said, “they’re bringing heavy tanks in here, just what we need.” And they came running and said, “Boy are we happy to see you guys.”’ Security considerations prevented Ghost Army soldiers from telling them the truth.

The third notional task force set up a phantom artillery unit. Dummy artillery pieces were set up about 600 yards (550 m) in front of the 37th Field Artillery Battalion. Flash canisters consisting of artillery shell casings filled with half a pint (0.25 ℓ) of black powder were used to simulate firing at night. Telephone lines were run between the real artillery and the Ghost Army’s fake batteries to synchronise the canister flashes with the real firing. The impostors operated for three nights and received 20 to 25 rounds of enemy fire, while the real artillery received none.

In many ways the deception was a success.

Intelligence officers reported that the Germans shifted from 20 to 50 artillery pieces to meet what they evidently believed to be a major armoured threat. After the fall of Brest, captured German officers told interrogators they believed that the 6th Armored had really been there, when in fact it had been just the illusionists of the Ghost Army. But the deception did not achieve the goal of bluffing Ramcke into an

Weapons of Mass Deception

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The 1,100-strong Ghost Army would usually impersonate a specific, much larger division, such as the 6th Armored Div­ ision, which had 15,000–20,000 soldiers. This photo shows a

mock-up of an artillery piece typically used to support large divisions. Photo courtesy of the US National Archives.

early surrender. He and his men fought on for four more weeks. Furthermore, in the minds of most Ghost Army veterans any success they could claim was overshadowed by the deadly consequences of an American attack mistakenly launched right from where the Ghost Army was attracting German attention.

General Troy Middleton, the American commander at Brest, had ordered a general attack on the Germans to take place on August 25. Due to a lack of communication, or perhaps a failure to appreciate the impact of the deception, one company of light tanks moved in on the Germans from precisely the area where the Ghost Army had been simulating a tank battalion. German anti-tank weapons, drawn by the deception, opened fire on the real American tanks. ‘Those guys never reached the line of departure,’ recalled Jarvie. ‘They just got decimated.’

The incident weighed heavily on the men.

Decades later, Jarvie remained haunted by the fact that the GIs manning those tanks undoubtedly thought the heavier tanks of the 6th

Armored would be there to support them. ‘We had no way of knowing they were going to kick off an attack,’ said Jarvie, ‘and they had no way of knowing that we weren’t going to help them.

And it makes you feel lousy.’

Brest was a learning experience for the Ghost Army, a chance to rehearse before a live audience, to see what worked and, more importantly, what didn’t. A few weeks later, in their next deception, they would need to use what they had learned to carry off what may have been their riskiest mission of the war, holding a vulnerable spot in the line for General George Patton.

After sweeping out of Brittany, Patton’s Third Army raced across France, all the way to the Moselle River and the border with Germany, stopping only when fuel ran low and German resistance stiffened. Patton massed his troops for an attack on the fortified city of Metz, leaving a dangerous gap to the north, with as few as 800 men covering one stretch of 20 miles (32 km). ‘If the Germans realised that there were effectively no troops in the 70 mile (113 km)-wide stretch,

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Many of the soldiers of the Ghost Army were artists, architects, or set designers recruited from New York and Philadelphia art schools and encouraged to use their talents and imagination in a theatre of quite a different kind. It is estimated that their multimedia show saved many thousands of lives. Several of these soldier-artists went on to have a major impact on art, the most prominent probably being Ellsworth Kelly.

they could have broken through easily,’ said military historian Jonathan Gawne. ‘They could have surrounded Patton at Metz to the south. This was a very severe risk.’ The mission of the 23rd was to plug the hole in the line by once again pretending to be the 6th Armored Division, which was still working its way east.

They drove 250 miles (400 km) from Paris across France and Luxembourg. On the night of September 15 they pulled in near the town of Bettembourg, just south of Luxembourg City.

They were apprehensive about being just a few kilometres from the front, with very few fighting troops around. After a few hours of fitful sleep, they leaped into their newest role the next morning.

Allied air superiority was limiting German aerial reconnaissance, so they adjusted their technique, setting up only 23 dummy tanks, relying more on radio, sonic, and special effects to carry out the deception. With the Germans just across the Moselle, sonic deception was particularly crucial. Sonic trucks operated for four straight nights. Sergeant Victor Dowd heard ‘enormous sounds of tracks racing through the forest, sounded like a whole division was amassing. Loudspeakers blaring, sergeants’ voices yelling, “Put out that goddamned cigarette now.”

It was all fakery—it was all a big act.’

Numerous special effects were staged. The men received a cursory briefing on the 6th Armored before being sent into nearby towns, supposedly on recreation leave, where they could be overheard talking about their division in cafés and bars. Ghost Army soldiers guarded intersections dressed as Military Police from the 6th Armored. In one especially brazen

special effects ploy, a three-jeep convoy with 6th Armored markings pulled up to a tavern run by a suspected Nazi collaborator. Out stepped the division’s commanding general and his aide (actually two officers from the 23rd in disguise), accompanied by menacing bodyguards with machine guns. The group ‘liberated’ six cases of fine wine, loading them onto the general’s jeep. The little convoy then took off, giving the seething proprietor plenty of incentive to get word to the Germans about what he thought he had just witnessed: the American 6th Armored Division moving into what was in reality a thinly held area.

Operation Bettembourg was originally only supposed to last for two days, until the 83rd Infantry Division could arrive to fill the hole.

But the 83rd was delayed, so the deception stretched out day after perilous day. Every passing hour increased the odds that the Germans might see through the ruse. The enemy, which had retreated across France in disarray, was regrouping and becoming more aggressive.

German patrols of 20 men or more were crossing the river, probing American lines. Civilians reported seeing Germans in nearby woods.

Telephone wires laid by the Signal Company were found cut. The mood grew tense. As Lieutenant Bob Conrad put it, there was nothing between the Ghost Army and the Germans ‘but our hopes and prayers’.

Even General Patton was feeling the pressure. He commented on the situation (without mentioning the Ghost Army) in a letter to his wife. ‘There is one rather bad spot in my line, but I don’t think the Huns know it. By tomorrow night I will have it plugged. [The 3rd Cavalry] is

Weapons of Mass Deception

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An inflated rubber L-5 reconnaissance plane used by the Ghost Army at one of the last operations on the western border of Germany. Their last performance, Operation Viersen, successfully fooled German forces into converging to defend a point on the Rhine miles away from the actual attack. Photo courtesy of the US National Archives.

holding it now by the grace of God and a lot of guts.’ The very next day the 83rd Division arrived on the scene, and the men of the Ghost Army gladly relinquished that part of the line.

Operation Bettembourg was the Ghost Army’s longest deception of the war. The 23rd’s Operations Officer, Colonel Clifford Simenson, considered it a turning point for the unit. ‘It was our first operation that was executed fully professionally and correctly.’ Now they felt they had proved their value beyond a doubt.

The 23rd went on to carry out 18 more deception operations over the course of the war, drawing on the techniques they had perfected in Operations Brest and Bettembourg. During the Battle of the Ardennes they helped draw German attention away from the effort to relieve Bastogne. And as the war neared its end, they put on a dazzling deception along the Rhine River, their biggest ever, that drew the enemy away from a real crossing by the Ninth Army.

Deception is carried out by all armies. During the Second World War, the Germans made particularly good use of it in disguising their build-up during the Battle of the Ardennes. But there is nothing to suggest that the German Army, or any army in any war, had a unit like this one: mobile, multimedia, dedicated to battlefield

deception and capable of pulling it off time after time without being found out. The Ghost Army was unique.

How effective was it? ‘There are German records that show that some of the deceptions were taken hook, line and sinker,’ said Jonathan Gawne, author of Ghosts of the ETO. A United States Army analysis 30 years after the war also sings the praises of the unit. ‘Rarely, if ever, has there been a group of such a few men which had so great an influence on the outcome of a major military campaign.’

Of the 1,100 men who served in the unit, only a couple of dozen remain alive today. The Ghost Army will soon be an army of ghosts. But what they did is worth remembering. It is estimated that their deceptions saved many thousands of lives. Using only imagination and illusion, they pulled off one of war’s most difficult man­ oeuvres: making the enemy dance to their tune.

‘You have to see into the mind of your adversary,’ said General Wesley Clark, former Commander of NATO, remarking on the unit. ‘You have to create for him a misleading picture of the operation to come. And you have to sell it to him with confidence. It’s the highest kind of creativity in the art of war.’ ☐

Etchmiadzin, Armenia

ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS

The unexpectedly diverse and beautiful bus stops of the former USSR, lovingly documented by photographer Christopher Herwig. w-t-w.co/xc6

With 20 years of experience in over 90 countries, Christopher Herwig is a Canadian-born photographer and videographer determined to find beauty and inspiration in all aspects of life.

Above: Saratak, Armenia Left: Saratak, Armenia

The former Soviet Union was a vast amalgamation of 15 republics stretching from the Gulf of Finland in the north to the border of Iran in the south, and from the Pacific Ocean in the east to the border of Czechoslovakia in the west. And though life there was highly centralised, there were also unique, imaginative expressions of its diverse peoples and places to be found. Among them, perhaps surprisingly, were bus stops.

Cars were a luxury that few Soviet citizens could afford, but the public transportation system was highly developed and widely celebrated, and bus routes reached even the most remote corners of the country. Architecture students were often assigned bus stops as one of their first independent projects and encouraged to create something never before seen. Free from the usual rules and prohibitions of Soviet style, imaginations could run wild as designers strove to reflect the

national colours of their cultures, producing an incredible variety of forms and structures.

The bus stops caught the eye of Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig on his 2002 bicycle trip from London to St Petersburg, launching a 12-year project that would take him to 13 countries. The project culminated in the book Soviet Bus Stops (FUEL Publishing, 2015) that represents over 30,000 km of epic road trips.

The bus stops (or ‘bus pavilions’, as they were respectfully called) captured in his book are not lacking in grandeur or audacity. Many of them are no longer in service, but provide convenient meeting points where people in remote, pub-less areas come together to hang out, converse and share their favourite beverages.

Pitsunda, Abkhazia

Taraz, Kazakhstan

Shymkent, Kazakhstan

Aralsk, Kazakhstan

OUR COUNTRY IS THE WORLD

In the wake of the Second World War, former bomber pilot Garry Davis decided that the only way to ensure lasting peace was the establishment of a unified world government.

He launched his effort to bring that about by renouncing his American citizenship and travelling with a self-issued World Passport.

Jeroen Junte is an independent journalist based in Amsterdam. Regularly travelling for his research projects, he has rich experiences with passport controls while crossing borders.

Garry Davis, right, the holder of World Passport number 1, in trouble in Basel, Switzerland in 1975. Davis was sentenced to seven days’ imprisonment by a Swiss court for illegal border crossing and was deported to France. In 1948 this former American citizen gave up his US passport, became a self-proclaimed world citizen, and began to travel the world with his self-issued document.

Photo courtesy of Keystone Press Agency/Keystone USA.

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After the horrors of the Second World War, the concept of a world passport appealed to many as an apolitical document of identity based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and notable statesmen and intellectuals expressed support for the idea of world citizenship.

‘Passport please?’ For citizens of prosperous, democratic states it’s a casual question, almost a sort of welcome. For the rest of the world, however, it means suspicion, scrutiny, a screening out of undesirables. Imagine then, a world passport, one that would be not just a travel document, but a symbol to unite all mankind instead of an instrument to divide people into national entities. Imagine ‘no countries […] nothing to kill or die for,’ as John Lennon put it.

Imagine whistleblowers and political activists travelling and working freely, and artists like Ai Wei Wei staging their provocative art all over a world where anyone can go anywhere anytime.

That’s exactly what 34-year-old American veteran and former Broadway actor Garry Davis (1921–2013) did when he walked into the US embassy in Paris on May 25, 1948 to surrender his passport, renounce his nationality and declare himself to be a ‘citizen of the world’.

Politely but firmly he was escorted out, officially still an American citizen though no longer in possession of an official passport. A few months later, he pitched a tent on the pavement of the Palais de Chaillot in Paris where the delegates of the United Nations were to assemble. Davis was ordered to leave, but refused, declaring before the gathering crowd that he was no longer in France but in ‘international territory’. After forcing his way into the UN session to protest against what he saw as the inadequacy of that organisation he was arrested and forcibly removed, and the French wanted to deport him but couldn’t, as he had no passport.

It may have seemed like a prank at the time, with Davis as the cheeky youngster loudly

drawing attention to the nakedness of the emperors of his day, but it was an event leading up to one of the most utopian visions of the 20th century, and in 1953 Davis founded the World Government of World Citizens (WGWC), an organisation that would seek to fulfil Article 13-2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.’

Davis believed that a world passport would be an important step towards bringing this to pass, a document that would overcome nationalism and repression, a symbol of ‘the fundamental oneness and unity of the human community’.

More than half a century later, the WGWC has issued its World Passports to hundreds of thousands of people, among them such notable personalities as Albert Camus, Albert Einstein and Richard Buckminster Fuller. A three-year passport costs US$55 (€49) and can be applied for by mail, the whole procedure taking roughly a fortnight. The passport itself looks, for lack of a better word, stately, and true to its title, contains text in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Esperanto.

Issuing a passport, however, is hardly the same thing as gaining the formal recognition of the nations of the world. During his lifetime Davis was arrested at least 32 times while trying to use a World Passport to enter various countries including Japan, France, Canada and Russia. He made his first attempt at the Indian border in 1956, dressed in a homemade uniform and carrying a passport he had printed himself.

Since he eventually managed to get in, India is the first of the more than 100 nations claimed

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33 Scan of the World Passport granted to the author. The passport was requested online, paid for by credit card and delivered by courier within a few days.

According to the accompanying documents, appearances make a difference and individuals are recommended to be courteous, respectful, presentable and well groomed. The World Service Authority has issued more than four million documents, and claims that the passport is accepted in Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Mauritania, Tanzania, Togo and Zambia.

by the WGWC to have acknowledged its passport although Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Mauritania, Tanzania, Togo and Zambia are the only countries listed as having officially done so. The rest of the list consists of countries where confused or incompetent border officials thought letting a traveller enter was the fastest solution to a problem they could not handle, and to this day it is difficult to say where and when the passport will work.

The WGWC considers this merely a minor delay in a grander plan. ‘The passport is one of our means to a bigger end, world peace,’ explains David Gallup, president of the WGWC, speaking from its headquarters in Washington, DC. ‘This will be achieved by establishing a fully

functioning world government with institutions such as a World Parliament and a World Court of Human Rights, and with a World Currency based on energy spent and CO₂ emissions, an idea first proposed by Buckminster Fuller.’ As for existing institutions like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, ‘these institutions are restricted by the veto right of the powerful states or limited funding. A world government is truly democratic and represents all the people.’

None of these institutions of the WGWC have yet been realised, but Gallup remains hopeful.

‘According to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer all revolutionary ideas must pass three stages: ridicule, opposition and finally acceptance.’ So far the World Government seems

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Garry Davis’ idealism was backed by a great sense of theatrical expressiveness. Davis worked as a Broadway stage actor, and although he often argued his way out of precarious situations, he was also arrested dozens of times for attempting to enter countries without official papers, carrying only a passport of his own design.

stuck in the phase of ridicule, ‘but opposition is growing,’ says Gallup.

The fact that few people take the WGWC seriously may be partially attributed to Garry Davis himself, since the organisation was not only his brainchild, but also more or less a one-man show. As much a performer as an activist, he was known for border tactics that drew as much on his theatre experience as on his idealism: dress immaculately, speak articulately, have all the paperwork neatly in order, move up the chain of command as quickly as possible and most importantly, show determination. Well into his sixties, for example, he landed at Tokyo’s Narita Airport, where he argued with the border officials who refused him entry, appealed to the Minister

of Justice, was detained overnight and placed on a return flight, got himself thrown off the plane, escaped from detention the next day, and immediately went downtown to do interviews at a Japanese daily newspaper. Recaptured, he was escorted back to Seattle by two armed private security guards, where immigration officials were confronted by a conundrum: the US had classified him as an ‘excludable alien’ in 1977, making it impossible for him to enter the country, as Davis made clear in a promptly issued press release. Border crossings, however, were far from his only activities. He also ran for mayor of Washington, DC in 1986 (receiving 585 votes), and also ran for President of the World in several self-organised elections. Quips such

Our Country is the World

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In 1949, Garry Davis was allowed to fly from France to Belgium without a passport or any other papers, the first person to do this legally.

He was allowed to stay in Belgium for 24 hours to address a meeting of his followers. Photo: Planet News Archive

as ‘The World Passport is a joke—but so are all other passports’ did nothing to convince sceptics of the viability of his project.

For a short moment after the fall of the iron curtain it looked as if a wind of change was blowing. ‘The first passport of Vytautas Landbergis, the first president of the newly created state of Lithuania, in 1991 was a World Passport,’ says Gallup. ‘At that time we had a yearly revenue of over a million dollars.’ Today that sum is a meagre US$300,000 (€268,000). Still, Gallup considers the current migrant crisis to be a reflection of the need for the WGWC to carry on.

‘The real problem is not the number of refugees but the absence of a functional government and basic human rights in large parts of the world, a

situation that could have been prevented with a functioning world government.’ He admits that valid World Passports would not entirely solve this problem, but says that they ‘would provide at least a proof of identity and a minimum of human rights to these stateless people.’

The last time that the WGWC rose to such an occasion, however, was in July 2013 when whistleblower Edward J. Snowden was stranded at a Moscow airport because his US passport had been revoked. Davis immediately issued a World Passport to Snowden, his last official act.

A week later the champion of a unified mankind died at the age of 91 years. Snowden, trapped between two powerful nations, never received the passport. ☐

Seemingly simple design decisions can have the short-term impact of making a school building more or less comfortable. When that environment influences whether or not students complete their education, however, the shape of a roof can affect the future of a country.

Blackboards at the ends of the buildings provide children the opportunity to finish schoolwork in daylight hours before returning home. The blackboards are also used at lunchtime and by local children at weekends.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A SCHOOL CAN MAKE

Giovanna Dunmall is a London-based journalist writing about design and architecture. When she found out about a new school located in Bethel, Burkina Faso that was cool inside even when outdoor temperatures were over 40°C (104°F) she wanted to write about the way its simple but innovative design had the power to change lives.

Grant Smith is an Australian photographer based in London. He has photographed major civil engin­eering and construction projects across the world, but also this school in Burkina Faso.

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Above: Students wait for their lunch, provided by AEAD, in the shade provided by the projecting eaves on the raised steel roof. The raised metal roof allows for venting, keeping the classroom cool.

The external temperature is typically about 40°C.

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Next page: The few trees on the campus provide minimal shade. The breezeway is visible in the larger building, as are the blackboards at the ends of the buildings.

The buildings are oriented so that the longer sides receive the least sun.

The land-locked country of Burkina Faso in West Africa has one of the harshest climates and lowest literacy rates in the world. The latter is—in part—due to a massive shortage of school places and is exacerbated by the traditional concrete frame and block buildings that are the current standard school design. With no cement industry in the country, material for these structures has to be brought in from places like Togo or Benin, making the practice slow, expensive and unsustainable. Far worse, the flat metal roof design of the buildings turns the classrooms into ovens under the beating African sun where temperatures never go much lower than 25°C (77°F) in January and reach 40°C (104°F) or more in May. ‘Learning is very hard in that kind of oppressive heat,’ says Robin Cross, CEO and director of Article 25, a UK-based NGO that carries out construction work in vulnerable communities affected by natural disasters and poverty.

‘After midday these buildings are hotter inside than outside, which doesn’t make any sense.

Buildings are supposed to protect people from the climate, not make the climate more aggressive.’

One of the charity’s most recent projects has sought to buck the prevalent local inclination for all-concrete school buildings. It’s a series of one-storey classroom and latrine buildings for Bethel Secondary School in Gourcy, 130 km (81 mi) northwest of the Burkinabe capital Ouagadougou, that Article 25 recently completed in collaboration with Giving Africa, a UK charity, and AEAD (Association Evangélique d’Appui au Développement, the Evangelical Association for Support and Development), a local NGO that builds, maintains and runs several schools in the north of Burkina Faso, including Bethel.

Built predominantly out of a laterite stone quarried 2 km (1.2 mi) away, the elegant new

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buildings’ most distinctive feature is the geometric network of steel beams that lift the corrugated steel roofs 1 m (3 ft) above the classrooms, creating a welcome pool of shade. ‘By raising the roof you vent the underside of the metal, the heat is swept away, and the classrooms stay cool,’ explains Cross.

The windows on both sides of the classrooms provide cross-ventilation and have metal louvres that can be opened for light or closed to prevent sand coming in from the hot and dry harmattan winds. ‘There was no point putting glass in these windows; they would have just been a maintenance hazard and cost,’ Cross explains.

Individual buildings are also oriented so that they receive the least solar radiation, presenting the shortest walls to the sun as it rises and descends.

The effects of these simple ideas are farreaching. ‘When I walk into the new buildings in Bethel I don’t feel the heat at all,’ says pastor Philippe Ouedraogo, founder (with his wife) of AEAD. ‘And consider that Bethel School is in the northern part of Burkina Faso where it is hotter than in the south, and there are fewer trees and even less rainfall.’

130 words of caption. As Sharon roams the terrain of the Serengeti, I remember something about tomatoes. It is strange that some are green, but the rest are not. But it is time to shave, I thought.

A fragmentation bomb goes off in the street this morning ,but voter turnout

London-based architectural photographer Grant Smith was also impressed. He travelled to the school to photograph the new buildings and recalls the contrast with the tin-roofed two-storey concrete building in which the older classrooms are located. ‘It was stifling, there was no air movement and the classrooms gained heat all day,’ he says. ‘It was exhausting just climbing the stairs.’ The new classroom buildings are all on one level, so moving in and out of them is easy and the connection to the environment outside is immediate. ‘It was a relief to stand inside the classrooms after the oppressive heat outside.’

Also noteworthy was the project’s use of traditional laterite stone and local building labour and knowledge, both factors that offer far wider developmental benefits on the ground than a concrete building. ‘It means most of the money raised in the UK by Giving Africa and Article 25 was actually spent in Burkina Faso,’ says Ouedraogo. According to Cross, laterite stone has been used for generations in the area, but mainly for agricultural buildings and other highly utilitarian constructions. ‘Our job was to take this material, which is used for cowsheds and grain storage, and turn it into something

is strong. This behavior is embarrassing. For no reason Margaret bought some oven mitts. She has no oven, no refrigerator, no means of subsisting.

From the sofa in her house though one sees her Mormon neighbors in the fountain. Get the shotgun. If that is not

beer fermenting in the basement, Robert must have torn the garbage bags. A big mouse from northern Vermont runs over the roof, the motive is nutmeg. The suburbs are bogus, abhorrent even. Is there a thermos in this submarine. Bereft of egg nog I faint from hunger.

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Inside the classrooms, light can be regulated with the metal louvres. The louvres also keep out the dust carried by the harmattan winds. In addition,

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the windows also provide much better light than standard concrete-frame classrooms. The rooms are cooler and class sizes are smaller.

that actually looks good and makes people want to go to school,’ he says.

Students and teachers have responded with enthusiasm, using the classrooms at all hours, during lunch breaks and on evenings and at weekends too. As there is no electricity in neighbouring villages, and students often don’t have paper or pens at home, it is hard for them to study elsewhere. Azeta Ouedraogo, one of the female students at the school, likes the fact that the new classrooms are more spacious. ‘We are not so many inside,’ she says. She also likes the new latrines, declaring them ‘far cleaner’ than the previous ones.

Azeta touches on two essential points.

Before the new classrooms were built average occupancy at Bethel School was 100 students per classroom. According to Cross, the current average of 40 or 50 is still too high, but far better.

‘When you have that many students in a classroom the teacher can’t make his or her way to

the back of the class,’ he says, ‘so the standard of education goes down and only the people at the front are interacting with the teacher.’

More importantly, the project included the building of a latrine block with separate boys’ and girls’ sections, wash basins and 28 individual cubicles. These offer privacy and are a big factor in children staying in education after puberty.

‘Inadequate sanitation facilities deter children from going to school,’ says Cross. ‘They don’t want to go to school to use a dirty toilet, and who would?’ Girls in particular don’t go to school after puberty if the sanitation is poor, a factor that disproportionately affects the standards of girls’ education.

This open-minded and inclusive teaching approach is championed by Ouedraogo across all of AEAD’s schools. ‘Education in the public school system is about reciting and memorising things and repeating what the teacher tells you,’ he says. ‘That’s the way to get a good mark and

What a Difference a School Can Make

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A separate latrine block offers privacy, individual cubicles and separate sections for boys and girls. Providing good sanitation facilities is vital in ensuring that girls remain in secondary education.

get your certificate.’ Cross adds, ‘After eight years of school children are very good at writing down what’s on the board but they can’t look out of the window and describe the view, develop a business plan or write an essay.’

Ouedraogo promotes a different approach that aims at helping young people to acquire skills that they can use. ‘We want to teach people for life, we want people to use their skills and get out into the market and make money,’ he says.

And this applies to women as much as to men.

‘By the time young women leave Bethel School they should be able to start their own business or have a job.’

So will more schools be built using these simple but effective techniques? Both Cross and Ouedraogo hope so but the expense may be an issue. The cost of building three big classroom blocks (with a total of eight classrooms) and a latrine block was £150,000 (€206,760 or US$235,400). That may not sound like much

but it’s much more expensive than it would be in an industrialised country where cheap, locally manufactured products are available. ‘You could build the same buildings for half that amount in South Africa,’ says Cross, who is working with his team on ways to roll out this building type more cost effectively. But as local architect Kodzo Adali-Mortty points out, ‘The initial building costs may be higher but the running and maintenance costs are very low compared to other schools.’ Adali-Mortty, who oversaw the construction of the new classrooms, explains that traditional concrete-framed schools get cracks and leaks within months, plus the Bethel buildings are filled with natural light, so they require less artificial lighting.

Ouedraogo has a proven track record of building up schools from the ground, something the local government cannot do. ‘They haven’t got the resources or the connections to build a secondary school on their own,’ he explains.

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Students enjoy the new classrooms, and learning at Bethel School encourages personal initiative and independent thinking rather than rote learning.

‘The people governing are poor, there are few taxes coming in. That’s why they call on advocacy groups like mine to help them implement social policies in areas like education, health and even agriculture and food security.’ But the government does have land, in this case the 3.5 hectares (8.6 acres) that it gave to Ouedraogo to build Bethel School. And the fact that AEAD is a Christian NGO running a school in a largely Muslim area is irrelevant says Ouedraogo. ‘We have an open religious approach in the school and in Burkina Faso. People are not forced into anything.’

Ouedraogo plans to use the new buildings at night to house a technical and vocational school for further education. And over time, with the help of Article 25 and other NGO partners, AEAD plans to equip the school with further study

spaces, a library, a security building, sports facilities and, last but not least, bicycle shelters.

The latter are vital to improving the chances of children and young people, especially girls, getting an education. ‘A lot of these children come from a long way away and need to cycle to school,’ explains Cross. ‘If they leave their bike in the sun during the day the sun destroys the rubber of the tyres so they get punctures on the way home. For girls especially it’s unsafe to be walking home at night.’

Sometimes it’s the simplest measures that are the most far-reaching. This is true for these new classrooms where an enlightened choice of materials and straightforward passive architectural systems have the power to change the lives and educational prospects of hundreds of boys and girls in an impoverished land. ☐

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Jonah Goodman, former editor of COLORS, current member of WTW editorial board, wrote about improvised design during the Sarajevo siege in the WTW No.4, and innovations made in prisons in No.5

CARS THAT RUN ON TREES

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Wood-burning cars may seem like a steampunk fantasy or the backyard obsession of some mad tinkerer, but at one point they were commonplace in many parts of Europe, and the technology that powers them still finds practical applications today.

Deep in the forests of inland Sweden, Johan Linell pulls over, his engine dead. He and two friends leave the vehicle and fan out through the trees, returning with arms full of fir cones and dead wood. At the back of the car Linell unhinges the top of a tall steel box that towers from a hole in the boot. Smoke billows, and flames follow as he dumps the foraged wood inside. From the bottom of the tar-stained stack, thick, welded pipes clamber over the car’s body and snake to the front bumper, where they enter the engine like a patient’s feeding tubes. Within minutes, the car comes to life, smoothly running on solid wood.

For a brief moment, 70 years ago, nearly all civilian vehicles in Europe worked this way. As the Second World War dragged on and petrol became ever scarcer, wood emerged as the primary alternative transportation fuel. By 1945 around one million European vehicles were powered by wood gasification, using modifications similar to those on Linell’s Volvo. The operating principle is remarkably simple: by burning a barrel of wood or coal until it develops a core temperature of between 900° and 1,200°C (1,650° and 2,200°F), then restricting the fire’s supply of air, gasifiers produce flammable carbon monoxide that can be cooled, filtered, and delivered directly to a normal car engine.

Wood-powered automobiles were invented in 1905 by Thornycroft, an English car company, but it was another 20 years before Georges Imbert, a French chemist, made wood-gas travel a practical possibility. With a redesigned burning chamber that used suction from the engine

to pull gas downward through the hot core of the burning logs, his model could create a great deal more carbon monoxide than previous iterations.

It also ensured a steady burn, as gravity and the vibration of the vehicle would shake ash loose from the pile, settling new fuel into place.

By the 1930s, four European governments were actively researching Imbert gasifiers with a view to their use in mass transportation: politically neutral Sweden and Finland were looking to achieve fuel autonomy in a volatile region; Mussolini’s Italy, under a League of Nations trade embargo following its invasion of Ethiopia, sought an alternative fuel source to oil; and Nazi Germany was preparing for war.

Germany’s descent into the abyss is surreally documented in surviving copies of the statesponsored car magazine Motor Schau. Both proNazi propaganda and banal motoring periodical, its 1939 editions feature racing drivers wearing SS insignia, the Wehrmacht testing motorbikes, and swastika-festooned rallies celebrating the Kraft durch Freude car, or Volkswagen Beetle. In 1940, as each monthly issue announces the fall of another European capital, features on woodgas vehicles begin to appear, touting the technology as a fuel of national pride that will liberate Germany from dependence on foreign suppliers.

In the issues between 1941 and 1942, as the needs of the military caused Germany’s civilian oil supply to drop by more than 50%, the pages of Motor Schau fill with multiplying advertisements for gasifiers and also hard alcohol.

By 1943, the distinctive, tall, cylindrical stoves were mandatory on most vehicles in

Cars That Run on Trees

Adolf Hitler inspects a wood-gas vehicle. When originally published in a 1941 edition of Motor Schau magazine, the image ran above a quotation from

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the Nazi leader: ‘These vehicles will still have special significance after the war because increasing motorisation will mean we never have enough oil, which

Nazi-occupied countries, as liquid fuel resources were routed straight to the armed forces, particularly the Luftwaffe. In 2013 Greek mechanic Alexandros Topaloglou told researcher Alexia Papazafeiropoulou that despite the wartime restrictions, Greeks maintained a lively market in black market petrol, fooling officials by lighting gasifiers on their cars just before approaching German checkpoints. As Germany began to lose territory in 1944, at least fifty Tiger tanks were retrofitted with wood-gas units, and punishments for driving on petrol without written permission from the regional General—even for the military—became brutal.

Hitler’s personal views on wood-gas cars can be read in a 1941 issue of Motor Schau, alongside merry photographs of Der Führer

leaves us dependent on imports. This fuel from the homeland is good for the homeland’s economy.’

at a demonstration of Mercedes-Benz gasifiers. ‘These are vehicles that will have special significance after the war,’ he said. ‘Oil comes from abroad, but this is the fuel of our homeland.’

Four disastrous years later, Berlin’s gasifier cars would indeed take on a grim symbolism. During the savage winter of 1946, they rusted uselessly on the streets as Berliners smashed furniture and uprooted trees, desperately searching for firewood in the rubble of the German capital.

In the early 2000s when Linell decided to make his own wood-gas vehicle, he had only seen one once. Wood-gas vehicles in Europe are the exclusive domain of hobbyists, and his only source of parts and information was a local phone-in radio show called Serk I Fin, or ‘Search and Find’. On-air, Linell outlined his plan, and

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Johan Linell cleaning the cooler on his wood-gas Volvo, which he made from an old steel diesel tank. Cooling the gas

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makes it denser and condenses water out of the fuel mix so that more power is delivered to the engine. After use, Johan

was matched with Inge Nyman, an elderly listener who had lived through the Second World War and still had gasifier elements left over from the period. It was a breakthrough since, astonishingly, there was little else available, even though in 1945 there were over 60,000 woodpowered vehicles in Sweden, including boats, buses, tractors and a quarter of the country’s motorbikes.

Today hobbyists share advice on the Internet, and modern technology enables ‘woodgassers’ all over the world to benefit from the experience of authorities such as Finland’s Vesa Mikkonen and the Netherlands’ pseudonymous ‘Dutch John’. The gasifiers they build, however, still share much in common with their predecessors from the Second World War and are notably

found the inside of the cooler would be coated with a mysterious creamy substance. ‘It reminded me of Vaseline.’

finicky, demanding an intimate knowledge of their constructions, quirks and temperaments.

In Dutch John’s words, ‘the only person who can drive a wood-gas car is the person who made it’.

Even mass-produced versions from the 1940s, such as the 1943 German 3TO Opel Blitz Lastwagen, came with thick, illustrated operating manuals which detail how every week the Lastwagen needs its grate cleared and thoroughly washed, and every month its loose cork gas filter has to be removed, cleaned and reinstalled. Starting its engine, though a 20-minute process, mainly involves putting a match to the wood stack, but controlling gas and air flows around the engine, crucial for such challenges as driving uphill, traversing a valley, or stopping for more than three hours, requires

Cars That Run on Trees

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‘When you drive slowly, you see more,’ says Linell.

‘It’s almost like the country transforms according to your car. I sensed the same thing a year earlier, when I rode 500 km (311 mi) on a moped I had converted to run on ethanol. You see a whole new world.’

mastering combinations of four levers and a pull-knob. Gasification produces significant quantities of nitrogen, an inert gas which dilutes the fuel mixture, with the result that wood-gas cars are low-powered, and coaxing the best out of them—through judicious adjustment of valves and vents—is as much an art as a science.

There’s no reason, however, why gasification technology has to stay stuck in the last century, which is why Finnish wood-gas enthusiast Juha Sipilä built the world’s most advanced woodgas vehicle, the El Kamina, a modified truck containing a fully automated gasification system controlled by a computer embedded in its dashboard. Though only a prototype, his is a woodgas car that can be driven by anybody. Sipilä is more than just a hobbyist; he is a firm believer in renewable energy and in enabling people to live ‘off the grid’. He is also the founder of Volter Oy, an energy company dedicated to exploring wood gasification, as well as the creator of the ten-house eco-village Kempele, and, as of May 2015, the prime minister of Finland.

In 2010, Finnish society held a passionate public debate about a possible return to wartime fuel substitutes, particularly wood gasification.

In 1945, 80% of vehicles in Finland—46,000— ran on gasifiers, consuming more than 2,000,000 m³ (70,630,000 ft³) of wood in 1944 alone. The whole transition to a wood-based transport system took place in just two years.

Now, innovations such as the El Kamina show that many of the shortcomings of the process can

be overcome with new technology. Most persuasive of all, with 23 million hectares (88,800 mi²) of boreal roundwood forest and a population of only 5.5 million, Finland is one of the few countries in the world where trees could be a truly sustainable fuel source.

Jaarno Haapakoski, the CEO of Volter Oy since 2011, explains that a family of six living in the model village of Kempele, which is powered and heated by a large wood gasification plant, requires only 20 m³ (706 ft³) of wood per year.

According to Metla, the Finnish Forest Research Institute, Finland’s forests produce 104.5 mil­lion m³ (3,690.4 million ft³) of new wood every year, almost enough to cover the energy needs of every­body in Finland. What’s more, burning trees is a ‘closed carbon loop’: the carbon dioxide that trees release when they are burned is roughly equal to the carbon dioxide they pull from the air as they grow.

There is a downside. Wood-gas is primarily carbon monoxide, and carbon monoxide is odourless, lighter than air and exceptionally poisonous. At atmospheric concentrations of just 0.5% it can kill, and a mere 0.03% is enough to cause unconsciousness. In one incident in wartime Helsinki, passengers were seen entering a waiting taxi on a cold day. Ten minutes later, the taxi had not moved, and passers-by opened the doors and found the occupants unconscious, poisoned by a gas leak into the closed car compartment. A third of Finland’s estimated 25,000 wartime carbon monoxide intoxication victims

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‘Wood-gas is cheap, economical, and ends your dependence on gasoline, crude oil and petroleum.’ So reads the advert from Motor Schau, a Nazi-era motoring magazine. Wood-gas powered transport holds a special appeal for totalitarian regimes seeking independence from world trade, and is still used in North Korea today.

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Cars That Run on Trees

were affected while they were driving their cars, often with disastrous results, and wartime approaches to carbon monoxide detection were often crude. Denmark, for instance, installed caged mice or canaries near gasifier units to test for fatal gases. But today Haapakoski is unperturbed. Detectors are far more sophisticated, he says, and burners can be built with failsafes and alarms.

Nor is this the first wood-gas renaissance.

Between its resurrection in 21st-century Finland and its heyday in wartime Europe, interest in the technology blossomed in the 1970s in the wake of the global oil crisis. Some of the interest was defensive, such as that of Sweden, which developed three types of emergency gasifier ready to be mass-produced in times of crisis. But much of the interest arose in the developing countries with the most urgent need: rural Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The potential appeared huge. Any carbonbased waste can be gasified, whether rice husks, wheat chaff, walnut shells, fruit seed, sawdust, straw, peat or corncobs. Filters can be made of oil, charcoal, cork, water, cloth, porcelain chips or sisal. And with the right expertise, efficient gasifiers for cars or electrical generators can be built from oil barrels and rusty pipes. Large gasifier electricity plants have been effective in specific locations, such as the sawmills in Sapire, Paraguay and South Africa’s Eastern Cape, a coconut desiccator in Sri Lanka, powered by gasified coconut shells, or the several hundred small, rice-husk-gasifying power plants in China. Emergency units like the Power Pallet, a gasifier generator developed in California, have recently shown promise as a means of disaster relief in Liberia. But in the present day, methane generation from sewage has proved far more successful as an off-the-grid, alternative energy source. In poor countries, burnable solids like nut shells and straw can still be commodities, however cheap, while methane is created from waste.

Johan Linell and his friends Mikael Anderberg and Martin Johansson began building their wood-gas Volvo at the beginning of 2007. By July, it was ready, and they set off on a 5,420-km, (3,368 mi) wood-powered trip across Sweden.

The trip took 20 days despite the car’s top speed of 90 kph (56 mph), because stopping every

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50 km (31 mi) to refuel their original 1942 gasifier tank made progress slow.

In part, their route was dictated by the need to find wood. Foraging for fir cones and wind-felled trees can only be done in an emergency. Effective gasification requires wood that’s less than 20% water, meaning wood has to be properly dried out before it can be used. Wet wood not only reduces the power of the engine by adding steam to the mix and using up heat for evaporation; it can also cause ‘wood hang’ by burning so slowly that the wood fails to settle into the burner. ‘It’s like it bridges up and won’t fall down to where the fire is,’ explains Linell. ‘The centre gets cold, the gas creation process stops.’ It can also spread intense heat to the wrong parts of the system.

‘If you’re unlucky,’ says Linell, ‘it melts them.’

And if you are forced to forage, you can’t just use anything. ‘If you find a dead tree that’s a little bit dried up, you can use it, but it can’t be a pine tree,’ he says, ‘it has to be a fir tree. A big, dead Christmas tree. Not like one you’d have at home. A big one.’ Gasifiers cannot burn all shapes and sizes of fuel, either. Evenly sized pieces of wood ensure a consistent rate of combustion, necessary to avoid ‘pressure drop’, a sudden loss of power. On their journey around Sweden, Linell and his friends towed a trailer carrying an improvised wood-chopping machine made of a chainsaw, a piston, and an old car engine.

The trip left Linell with questions: ‘I was thinking, “Can I do something with this knowledge? Can I make a profit? Start a business?”

I could see that gasification just isn’t good for cars. It functions, but it’s demanding. With a modern lifestyle, it’s too much work, it takes too much time, and it’s too dirty. Even if you had the infrastructure, I don’t think people would use it.’ Agricultural applications, however, looked promising, essentially because ‘you’re more stationary—you can have your own pile of wood.’

Linell applied his skills to a 68-year-old tractor, and converted it to run on trees knocked down by the wind. He decided to spend the whole of 2008 living a self-sufficient, carbon-neutral life on his family farm in Dalarna, Sweden, cultivating potatoes, carrots, beetroot, turnips and lettuce with his new machine. In the end, there was no business plan, and he didn’t make a profit.

‘I just picked up an old tractor, and some wood from the woods, and got to work.’ ☐

Tomáš Baťa built the world’s largest shoe manufacturing enterprise out of a tiny family workshop by using production methods and management techniques that were revolutionary in his era, and which still find application today. w-t-w.co/d3h

THE COBBLER WHO CONQUERED THE WORLD

A customer being assisted by the saleswoman in the Baťa store in Prague.

By 1928, thanks to Tomáš Baťa’s drive and vision, Czechoslovakia was the biggest shoe exporter in the world.

Photo courtesy of Museum of Southeast Moravia in Zlín.

Rob Cameron is the BBC’s Prague correspondent. He wrote about the 1970s plans for the tunnel under the whole of Austria for WTW No.2.

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WTW #6

In an age when social entrepreneurship was unheard of, Tomáš Baťa built not only factories, but also homes, schools and hospitals for his workers… …as well as the most successful shoe store chain of his day.

When Tomáš Baťa boarded his personal plane on July 12, 1932, he was at the peak of his powers, a handsome, square-jawed man of 56 with a thick head of hair. From his headquarters in the Czech city of Zlín, he oversaw a worldwide manufacturing operation producing more than 35 million pairs of shoes annually. There were 1,825 Baťa outlets in Czechoslovakia alone, with another 660 across the globe. There were Baťa shops from Sweden to Syria, Baťa factories from Switzerland to Singapore, all bearing the same red cursive logo, and all run by the same methods and philosophy. Baťa sold affordable, fashionable, well-made footwear at a time when good shoes were luxury items.

The Baťa empire had also diversified extensively from its core business in the years since 1894, when Tomáš Baťa opened his first shoe workshop with his two siblings on Zlín’s town square. Now there were Baťa tanneries, Baťa engineering works, Baťa rubber plants, Baťa chemical refineries, Baťa power stations, Baťa coal mines, even a Baťa film studio. Baťa made bicycles and car tyres, gas masks and children’s toys. Everything was produced in highly automated, purpose-built, red-brick factories that employed 30,000 people in Czechoslovakia and thousands more abroad.

These workers enjoyed a standard of living that was the envy of the nation. The company provided housing, healthcare, insurance, education, leisure activities and entertainment—often in breathtakingly modern facilities equipped with the latest high-tech gadgets. Baťa operated railway lines, dug canals, and even built its own airport at Otrokovice, just down the road from the Baťa company headquarters in Zlín (where Tomáš Baťa was mayor).

It was here, just before six AM on a foggy summer morning, that the industrialist climbed into his Junkers two-seater, keen to get underway after being delayed at the airfield for two hours.

His personal pilot had urged him to linger a few minutes more to allow the fog to lift, but Baťa’s 17-year-old son Tomáš Jr. was waiting anxiously in Zurich. Later that day father and son were to open the newest addition to the Baťa empire, a 24-hectare (59-acre) complex in the Swiss town of Möhlin. For reasons that are still unclear, Baťa’s plane crashed a few minutes after take-off and broke into three pieces. He and his pilot were killed instantly. His funeral two days later was attended by 150,000 people. The factory sirens of Zlín wailed in mournful tribute.

‘Baťa was simply a genius,’ said Pavel Velev, director of the Tomáš Baťa Foundation, as he gave me a guided tour of the Baťas’ functionalist villa. ‘He did everything for his fellow man. His chief idea was to do things that would benefit people, his employees, his fellow citizens,’ Velev told me, opening a door into what was once Tomáš Baťa’s office. ‘Baťa didn’t just give his workers money. He gave them the opportunity to work, to live, and build a life for themselves.

He was rich, but he didn’t keep his riches for himself. Everyone here in Zlín was rich; they had well-furnished houses, they had well-paid jobs, the city was here to serve them. As Baťa famously said, “Buildings are just heaps of bricks and concrete. Machines, just a lot of iron and steel. What breathes life into them is people.”’

We gaze out of the window up the hill to the red-brick factory buildings in the distance. There are anecdotes of Baťa standing at this window at the crack of dawn, making urgent early morning phone calls to his employees: ‘Nováček! Why’s there so much steam coming out of Building 3?!’; ‘Topol! What are those pallets still doing outside Building 4?!’ He was, it seems, a man of relentless vigour with an eye for perfection. And the doctrine he developed over the course of his life was visionary. Bataism was an economic and social philosophy that cherry-picked the best ideas of the early 20th century and put them

The economic crisis of the 1920s severely affected Europe, especially Germany and the neighbouring countries; however, Baťa Shoes was expanding due to ballooning demand for its inexpensive shoes. Zlín, home of Baťa’s headquarters, became a prosperous hypermodern city and manufacturing centre. Facilities included not only plants that produced

textiles, rubber and plastic for socks and shoes, but also shoe polish and other chemical products. Furthermore, Baťa operated its own paper mills (to produce packaging materials), tree farms (to replenish the wood used by the paper mills), machine shops (to produce manufacturing equipment), brickyards (to build employee housing), farms (to

into practice in a shoe factory, a globalised social business model decades before these words even entered the common lexicon.

Baťa’s internship at the Ford Motor Company in 1904 seems to have inspired his use of automated assembly lines as well as his unpre­ cedented system of autonomous workshops, a chain of successive production units, each buying partially finished products from the previous unit, working on them, and then selling them on to the next unit in a process that continued until the shoe was finished and ready to leave the factory. This encouraged greater personal responsibility, raised standards and minimised waste.

The salary and benefits scheme too was generous and unique in an age when other industrial

supply subsidised food to workers and the city) and infrastructure (to transport goods and materials), as well as a coal mine and electrical plant (to power the whole operation). In 1923 the company boasted 112 branches.

Photo courtesy of Museum of Southeast Moravia in Zlín.

giants saw workers largely as a commodity to be exploited. ‘They did some surveys in the 1920s and 1930s, and found that the average weekly cost of living in Zlín was 161 crowns. Elsewhere in Czechoslovakia it was 257 crowns. The average weekly salary of a Baťa worker was 450 crowns,’ said Velev.

Baťa employees received their wages via Baťa bank accounts earning 10% interest per year.

Profits and losses were also shared in a unique motivational scheme which initially involved senior employees, but later applied to the junior ranks as well. When an autonomous unit produced good-quality work, on time and on budget, employees were rewarded with bonuses.

If the workmanship was shoddy or the designs out of fashion and unsellable, salaries were

Prior to 1894, the city of Zlín had a population of 3,000. The city grew rapidly, however, as thousands of families moved to Zlín to live in the large garden districts that Baťa Shoes built for its employees. Between 1923 and 1932, their numbers grew from 1,800 to 17,000; the city population

increased from 5,300 to 26,400. Zlín became one of functionalism’s greatest achievements, a living example of progressive architecture as a by-product of its construction techniques tracing its lineage to Le Corbusier’s vision of urban modernity and the Garden City proposed by Ebenezer Howard. The

urban plans proved to be futuristic, featuring sustainable, low-maintenance buildings, green spaces and integrated transportation.

Photo: J. Vaňhara, courtesy of Moravian Provincial Archives in Brno, State District Archives Zlín.

By 1927, Baťa Shoes had assembled a network of quality schools and wellequipped hospitals for its workers and their families, because founder Tomáš Baťa firmly believed that business

should serve the public. Baťa was one of the first companies to provide social services and health care for all employees, to employ handicapped individuals as a matter of policy, and to introduce a

docked. ‘Most people got used to the system,’ said Velev. ‘Those that didn’t left.’

Flush with an enormous disposable income, Baťa workers spent their hard-earned cash in Baťa canteens and Baťa department stores and Baťa cinemas and Baťa swimming pools in what Velev describes as a ‘cycle of money’. Many bought their own Baťa-built homes; neat, newly built red-brick houses, each with a little garden and the latest in modern conveniences.

The Baťa system might strike the modern reader as utopian or even Orwellian, with an employer’s tentacles reaching into every aspect of the employees’ lives. And the system did have its darker overtones; an employee overheard espousing Marxist ideas on the train, for example, might find himself without a job the following morning. Workers lived according to company ‘recommendations’, tenets of Baťa

five-day working week of 45 hours.

Photo: Petrůj, courtesy of Moravian Provincial Archives in Brno, State District Archives Zlín.

philosophy that guided everything from how much money to put by to when to get married.

But it’s important to place the Baťa vision into the context of an undeveloped rural region in south-east Moravia with few other prospects for gainful employment.

‘The work Baťa offered gave local people a chance to escape from the humiliating existence in which most of them lived,’ said Miroslava Štýbrová, a footwear historian and teacher based at the Tomáš Baťa Institute, newly opened in a renovated factory building known simply as Building 14. ‘Many of these people were shepherds, peasants; many had never even seen a big city. Overnight they were granted incredible opportunities, the chance to own their own houses, their own cars, to travel, to educate themselves. These are things that are difficult for us to comprehend today,’ she told me.

The Cobbler Who Conquered the World

Zlín, the original Bataville, had its own company cinemas, restaurants, sports facilities, garages, farms, grocers, butchers, post offices, newspaper and, of course, shoe shops. In short, it was just like every other city except

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that everything was owned by Baťa.

The danger was that an entire town was dependent on the fortunes of one company. Several of the Central European Batavilles—Baťovany (present-day Partizánske), Baťov (now Bahňák, part of

‘Baťa knew well from his time in Detroit that if he looked after his employees, if he provided job security, a social net, culture, sport—if he gave them a sense of well-being, something that most workers here at the time could only dream of—it would pay dividends in terms of both loyalty and productivity. As a result Tomáš Baťa’s employees genuinely looked up to him. It’s hard to understand today just how motivated they were. He turned them into fanatics, really, in the positive sense of the word. They were utterly committed to this joint effort, this joint work,’ Štýbrová said.

According to Velev, Tomáš Baťa’s motivation for treating his employees with fairness and respect stemmed from his own early failures.

‘I think it all goes back to his early attempts at creating a business. He suffered some cruel setbacks. And he had to overcome these crises on his own,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t a convinced

Otrokovice), and Zlín itself—were devastated by the communist regime, and later by the transition to a free-market economy.

Photo courtesy of Museum of Southeast Moravia in Zlín.

capitalist from the beginning. Far from it. He was sceptical about using the new modern machinery to mass produce shoes, for example. He was worried about exploiting his workers. But when those same workers convinced him it was saving them time, that it was making their lives easier, he began to change his mind.’

‘His primary motivation was the well-being of his employees. I think there are certainly such visionaries around today. But Baťa took it to another level. If you look at companies such as Google or Microsoft—okay, Bill Gates has given a lot of money to charity, he supports education and so on. But he never built houses for his employees, or cinemas or swimming pools.

Baťa’s vision was far more ambitious.’

Word spread quickly about ‘the miracle of Zlín’. In 1925, when Baťa opened his new School of Work, a specialised shoemaking

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Above: A group of young Egyptians, and below, Czech students in the ‘Baťa School of Work’. As the company grew, it built factories and towns across the world, in the US, Canada, India, France, the Netherlands, Brazil and Britain, all

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based on Zlín’s universal system. This Professional School of Footwear, a government-approved institution, educated thousands of young men and women of the company, providing rigorous professional training and social education, but

also teaching foreign languages, music and household management.

Photo: J. Vaňhara, courtesy of Moravian Provincial Archives in Brno, State District Archives Zlín.

The Cobbler Who Conquered the World

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Around the world, dozens of ‘Batavilles’—Batanagar in India, Batapur in Pakistan, Batatuba in Brazil, Batawa in Canada, Batadorp in the Netherlands, Baťovany in Slovakia, Bataville in France—continued to build on the principles established by Baťa in Zlín, supplying welfare and education of customers and employees alike.

school to train 1,500 apprentices, there were 10,000 applicants. They came not just from Czechoslovakia, but from Britain, France, Yugoslavia, Egypt and India.

Baťa relied on an unprecedented egalitarian training scheme for new employees, regardless of seniority. Apprentice shoemakers, middle managers, and designers all had to spend a number of weeks learning the business from the ground up, from tannery to showroom. It even became customary for wealthy entrepreneurs and politicians to send their privileged children to spend a month at Baťa to observe how a successful business functioned.

‘For some of them, such as Otto Wichterle, the Czech chemist who later invented the contact lens, this was a bit of a shock,’ explained Štýbrová. ‘Wichterle came here with his brother shortly after finishing university. They were from a rich family and arrived by car. Wichterle later wrote in his memoirs that they were expecting their own fancy offices, maybe with a secretary. Instead they were each given a broom and sent to sweep up scraps of leather in the tannery.

‘The idea was for future managers to understand what hard physical work meant, the hard physical work done by people who one day would be their employees. And equally, humble cobblers or shop assistants were given a taste of senior management and told that they too could rise through the ranks.’

‘It was a very good system,’ she added.

Factories and workers’ houses were laid out along generous boulevards as the city struggled

to keep up with the company’s relentless expansion. When the renowned French architect Le Corbusier visited Zlín in 1939 he described it as an ‘incredible example of an industrialised city’.

Not for nothing was it nicknamed ‘America in Czechoslovakia’. Sadly, the Nazi occupation of the Second World War and the subsequent rise of communism proved as devastating to the Baťa empire as to the country in general.

Renamed ‘Svit’ (‘Glow’) after the Second World War, the shoe factory suffered heavily from four decades of communist central planning. Even the city of Zlín was renamed, becoming Gottwaldov in 1949, in honour of Czechoslovakia’s ‘first working-class president’, and the Baťa name quickly became taboo. Today there is still life in these ‘heaps of bricks and concrete’, but it’s a different kind of life: sleepy, almost listless. Zlín is now a student city with little industry and certainly no shoe production.

Shortly after the Velvet Revolution, Tomáš Baťa’s son Thomas Bata (he discarded the diacritics after emigrating to Canada) stood on the same terrace, surveying the city his father had built. But it was with mixed feelings. Later, in one of the abandoned factory buildings, he stumbled across the very machine on which he had stitched together his first shoe in 1932, the year his father died. Plans to revitalise the giant plant after the collapse of the communist regime slowly fell by the wayside. The brick buildings and machines and conveyor belts were still there. But the burning entrepreneurial spirit had gone. ☐

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WTW #6

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Yara Khoury Nammour is a teacher and type and graphic designer. She wrote a book Nasri Khattar; A Modernist Typotect because she was intrigued by the promise of Unified Arabic to address the high rates of illiteracy in the Middle East.

FIGHTING ILLITERACY WITH TYPOGRAPHY The intriguingly beautiful calligraphic principles of Arabic script have long defied attempts to facilitate mass production by print technologies developed for Roman letters. Unified Arabic is one such attempt, and significant obstacles stand between it and widespread adoption.

In 1932, a Lebanese architect walked into a classroom at the American University of Beirut to fill in for a professor who taught basic Arabic typing skills. In an effort to welcome the class, he started typing ahlan wa sahlan (‘welcome’), but, finding it difficult to locate the right keys for the right variation of the letter heh, he mistakenly typed an initial heh form instead of a medial one.

He noticed, however, that what he had typed was still perfectly legible. He suddenly realised that by reducing the number of letter variations, the problem of finding keys on the typewriter could be easily solved without affecting the legibility of the text. He decided then and there to work on unifying all the variations of the Arabic letters.

The architect’s name was Nasri Khattar, and he called his project Unified Arabic.

Left: The 1955 children’s textbook Shouf Baba Shouf using a Unified Arabic typeface (UA Neo-Naskhi) compared to the same text set in traditional calligraphic type. Traditionally, a child learning

Unified Arabic (UA) is basically a set of 30 letterforms, one for each letter of the Arabic alphabet, plus hamza and lam alef, eliminating the variant forms that make reading and writing Arabic difficult for beginners. The Arabic writing system is based on flowing calligraphic forms that connect letters within words, and the letters vary in shape according to their position in the word. Most of its 28 letters have four varying shapes, initial, medial, final and isolated, but, with the addition of ligature forms (used when writing specific letter combinations) and vocalisation marks, a complete set of glyphs can easily reach up to 150 shapes, depending on the complexity of the script. This made typing Arabic immensely complicated, as the large number of Arabic letter variants was too large to fit on

Arabic needs to learn the different forms of each letter and the ways to connect them. Unified Arabic, on the other hand, teaches them separate letters whose forms don’t change depending on

context, which is significantly easier for five-year-old children.

All images courtesy of Unified Arabic Archives.

In the 1940s, Khattar developed a close relationship with Thomas Watson, head of IBM, who supported the Unified Arabic project. This is one of only six IBM

Unified Arabic typewriters produced.

Traditional typewriters included initial and isolated forms of letters (accessible by using the shift key), plus some special

the 44 available keys but Khattar realised that matters could be greatly simplified by distilling the hundreds of variant shapes into their most characteristic forms.

Using a reductive design process, Khattar worked to discover these characteristic shapes.

Hundreds of sketches reveal a struggle with the most basic forms on both the functional and aesthetic levels, while other sketches try to find solutions—ranging from the simple to the bizarre—for the dots and the vocalisation marks. Furthermore, the letters are designed to be representative of the streamlined spirit of Western civilisation: quick, mechanised and labour saving, similar to Latin type forms and proportions, which Khattar acknowledged as one of his inspirations.

keys for medial forms. The UA IBM used the basic keys, so each letter required just a single keystroke.

But would typewriter manufacturers be interested enough to invest in the project?

Remington Rand was the first to be approached, but the project quickly proved unrewarding, although one prototype Unified Arabic machine was actually produced. IBM, however, was quick to recognise UA’s socio-political implications, and so the journey began.

Unified Arabic was not the first attempt to adapt Arabic to mechanical printing processes.

As early as the 15th century, printers had attempted to simulate the cursive forms using movable type, but their efforts to stay true to the script’s calligraphic nature resulted in type cases of up to 500 characters per font (roughly eight times the size of the Latin character set), making manual and mechanical typesetting a laborious

Fighting Illiteracy With Typography

63 Comparison of two typewritten letters, the top one typed in traditional Arabic, and the bottom one with UA IBM. Khattar proposed a keyboard layout designed for maximum efficiency and speed, mapping the most frequently used letters to the most accessible keys, so Arabic typists achieved higher speeds than English typists.

task at odds with the demands of unit-based mass production.

By the end of the 19th century, the detrimental social and economic effects of the impracticality of printed Arabic were clear: throughout the Levant region (modern-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt) illiteracy was widespread, and books were scarce and expensive, available exclusively to the ruling class and clergy. However, after 400 years of stagnation under Ottoman rule in Syria and Lebanon, and influenced by French and English colonial rule in Egypt, the people of the region were gradually waking up to the distant thunder of the Industrial Revolution coming from the West, setting the stage for renewed efforts to facilitate reproduction of the Arabic printed word.

Spurred by a growing rate of literacy, inadequate supply of books and favourable political circumstances, several reform trials in the Arab region began, instigating a movement of cultural change closely linked to the printed word. This movement, a form of a revived Arab Renaissance, called for a literary cultural awakening, new religious interpretations, modernised political ideas and language reform, opening the door to a new visual interpretation of the Arabic letterforms. By the beginning of the 20th century, the time was ripe for rapid modernisation. Unified Arabic, whose core idea was simplification by eliminating the unnecessary, seemed perfectly matched to its time.

By April 1932, Khattar had completed his first set of Unified Arabic letters. A trained architect,

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Above: Nasri Khattar holding one of the earliest samples of Unified Arabic letterforms, a project that he worked on from the 1930s until his death in 1998.

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Below: A lunch at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, organised by IBM to introduce the Unified Arabic project. The lunch was attended by many dignitaries and ambassadors, as well as supporters

of the project, including Thomas Watson, head of IBM, and Frank Laubach, who developed a literacy programme benefiting millions worldwide.

Fighting Illiteracy With Typography

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In 1986, Nasri Khattar was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his lifelong Unified Arabic project and its implications for the fields of linguistics, literacy, printing, computers, and telecommunications. He was probably the only designer/ typographer considered for the prestigious award.

Yale graduate and apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, Khattar lived and worked in New York.

In 1947, IBM appointed Khattar its ‘ambassador’ to the court of King Farouk of Egypt, in collaboration with Dr Frank Laubach’s mission for the worldwide abolishment of illiteracy. He was sent armed with six brand new IBM electric type­ writers bearing the new Arabic letters along with fully vocalised printed specimens of Al-Fatiha, the first chapter (surah) of the Holy Koran. In that same year, Khattar sent his first proposal to the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo, which was searching the Arab world for ways to reform the writing system. His proposal was set in Neo-Beiruti, a UA typeface with detached letters, which would soon be joined by Neo-Naskhi.

The Academy did not accept his proposal, but Laubach proved to be a firm supporter. He recounts in a letter to Khattar: ‘I had a very exciting experience this afternoon. They brought in an illiterate girl… I taught her one lesson in front of one class, and another this PM in front of another class… She is ready right now to read any easy book with KHATTAR LETTERS… OH, how I pray you may succeed, for learning Arabic will be child’s play when they use your letters.’

In 1957 Khattar received another big boost in the form of a grant from the world-renowned philanthropic institution, the Ford Foundation.

It resulted in the official establishment of the Unified Arabic Alphabet Foundation (UAAF), a not-for-profit educational organisation concerned with developing simpler typographical

methods of reproduction. From his centre of operations in Beirut, Lebanon, Khattar set out on the second stage of his journey, focusing on marketing UA, manufacturing UA metal type, and publishing educational booklets using UA as the main text typeface. His efforts included several exhibitions showcasing the system’s benefits, as well as a short promotional movie featuring the marionette work of the famous puppeteer Bill Baird.

He also sent a second proposal to the Academy, this time with a full repertoire of Unified typeface styles including ones using connected letters such as UA Neo Kufic, UA Classiky, UA Al-Raya, UA Makana/Al-Najeeb and Al-Sayyal. It later became known that his proposal played a pivotal role in the Academy’s search, and was one of three finalists out of a total of 266 that were selected for debate within the Academy.

Unfortunately for Unified Arabic, time was not on its side. Interest in the concept waned as technology advanced, creating systems more capable of handling Arabic’s large character set and cursive nature. As first the Linotype machine and then digital publishing systems were introduced, the need to accommodate the limitations of older mechanical processes disappeared.

At first glance it may seem that all the favourable conditions for Unified Arabic to flourish had converged: a recognised need for language reform, a simple reductive type design that solved a long-time printing problem, support

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WTW #6

Students of Arabic start by learning its basic, unconnected letter shapes, only to be confronted with a myriad of wildly differing variations. The letter meem, aside from its four basic shapes, has more than 30 ligature forms.

from IBM, funding from the Ford Foundation, patents and copyrights registered in the US and other countries, an extensive marketing campaign and prototype products, not to mention endorsements from people of stature in the field of linguistics, education and literature. And yet, entrenched and immovable forces stood in opposition, forces that cannot be attributed to specific religious scholars or educational ministers or substantive examples of opposition to UA in daily life.

To begin with, language and form are closely related in the Arab world, and the calligraphic nature of Arabic script is an essential aspect of Arabic cultural identity, an aspect of greater significance than Western-style economy and efficiency. UA’s concessions to the limitations of a Western technology were not seen as a mere simplification of a complicated writing system, but rather as a surrender to Western standards and a rejection of Arab culture and heritage. The Arab world saw its highly complex language as very much alive, manifesting itself in magnificent calligraphic practice, widespread use and flexible design forms. The Arab world was a truly calligraphic world that accommodated complexity, but rejected simplicity, which it considered retrograde.

Furthermore, since the Quran was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed in Arabic, the language and its letters are absolute and holy, nearly untouchable, a uniting factor forming a brotherhood amongst Arabs. Ninety per cent of Muslims

pray in Arabic, whether or not it is their mother tongue. This religious dimension also makes any language reform a highly complex and sensitive issue with moral implications, an idea perhaps difficult for the Western mind to fully grasp.

In one sense, new technologies made Unified Arabic obsolete before it could overcome the massive obstacles opposing its adoption. But from another point of view, the issues that led to its development still demand resolution: a report released in 2012 by the Arab Thought Foundation finds that on average an Arab reads six pages a year, compared to the 11 books read by an American and seven by a British person.

The paucity of Arab book printing is not the only issue; the language’s presence online, in digital systems and their applications are also important considerations in today’s increasingly electronic world. And while digital typesetting is coming closer and closer to imitating various styles of Arabic calligraphy, the economy of illiteracy may yet precipitate a system overhaul, including a simplified writing system.

In 2013 UA Neo B and UA Neo N, digital versions of UA Beiruti and UA Neo Naskhi respectively, were released by Pascal Zoghbi of 29 Letters type foundry. The revival is an attempt to give educators and designers the opportunity to explore the usage of unified detached Arabic typefaces. It opens the doors wide for real-world tests and applications that could eventually break down the old barriers to UA’s adoption, making it an old idea still worth revisiting. ☐

Fighting Illiteracy With Typography

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Above: Sample pages from the children’s book Shouf Baba Shouf. The UA forms are placed next to the traditional ones for direct comparison and learning.

Below: An excerpt from a promotional brochure explaining the concept of Unified Arabic, which gave each letter of the Arabic alphabet a single, unified shape. The translation reads: ‘These six words are made up of three letters that do not change form irrespective of their position. Printing them in traditional Arabic would require twelve variant forms instead of just three.’

COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHY

BEFORE

COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHY

Colour photographs taken over a hundred years ago using a primitive, long-abandoned process which produces spectacular images. w-t-w.co/8uv

Colour photography came into its own in the 1970s when adequately sensitive films finally became affordable for amateur photographers, the result of more than a hundred years of effort by a long series of scientists and hobbyists trying to push imaging technology past black and white. Probably the earliest experiments with three-colour separations were made in the 1860s by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who established the theoretical foundations for colour perception but was unable to develop a process for accurate colour reproduction.

In 1908, the Russian chemist and photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky took the first colour photo in Russia, a photo of novelist Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. The fame of this photo led to an audience with Tsar Nicholas II, who commissioned ProkudinGorsky to document the Russian Empire and granted him special access to its restricted areas.

He travelled with a small team in a specially equipped railway carriage photographing churches, monasteries and emerging industries, as well as the daily life and work of Russia’s diverse population. Over the course of ten years, his collection grew to number over 10,000 photos.

Previous spread: At the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian photographer Sergey Mikhayl­ovich Prokudin-Gorsky (1863–1944) used a special colour photography process to create a visual record of the Russian Empire. Some of his photographs date from about 1905, but the bulk of his work is from between 1909 and 1915, when, with the support of Tsar Nicholas II and the Ministry of

Transportation, he undertook extended trips through many different parts of the empire.

Below: A peasant family at the end of a harvest day by their sheaves of rye. The exact location of this image is not specified, although the position of this photograph in Prokudin-Gorsky’s album of contact prints suggests that the photo was taken along the Sheksna/

Vytegra Rivers within the Mariinsk Waterway System linking St Petersburg with the Volga River basin and now known as the Volga–Baltic Waterway.

All photographs courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Prokudin-Gorsky Collection.

The photographs are remarkably engaging, not only for their extraordinary documentation of pre-revolution Russia, but also for their vivid colours and stunning quality. To this day, nobody knows exactly what camera Prokudin-Gorsky used, as no documentation of his equipment is known to exist, but it was likely a large wooden

camera with a special holder for a sliding glass negative plate, taking three sequential monochrome photographs, each through a different coloured filter. Although such cameras were commercially available, it is also possible that Prokudin-Gorsky, the holder of a patent for a simultaneous-exposure camera, built his own,

Previous page: A guard keeps watch next to a squatting visitor while prisoners huddle behind the bars. The guard is dressed in a Russian-style uniform, with a sheepskin hat and high leather boots, holding a rifle with a bayonet.

Prokudin-Gorsky was particularly interested in recently acquired territories of the Russian Empire such as Turkestan

(present-day Uzbekistan and neighbouring states), which he visited on a number of occasions, including a trip in January 1907 that focused on the ancient cities of Bukhara and Samarkand. In contrast to extensively Russified Samarkand, Bukhara’s traditional culture and appearance remained relatively intact.

Above: Workers taking a break in the packaging department of a mineral water warehouse in Borzhom, a resort town in south-central Georgia.

Hotel Gagra. In the spring of 1912, Prokudin-Gorsky went to photograph the Caucasus region, including the resort of Gagra in Abkhazia, located in the northern part of Georgia and on the coast of the Black Sea. In 1864, Abkhazia had been formally annexed by the Russian Empire. At the turn of the 20th century, Prince Aleksandr Petrovich Oldenburgsky invested heavily in the

northeast coast of the Black Sea to turn the area—which had spectacular scenery—into a Russian Riviera. Its subtropical climate made Gagra a popular health resort in both Tsarist and Soviet times. Seen here is the main entrance to the Gagra hotel; construction on this building began around 1902.

The image to the right shows three monochrome diapositive images taken

as well as the three-colour projection system used to display his work.

Sequential-exposure cameras were used mainly for landscape photography (or very patient still subjects), as they required lengthy exposures and two repositionings of the camera’s plate holder. The quality and resolution of

with Prokudin-Gorsky’s camera. They were taken one after another through a red, green and blue filter respectively.

Prokudin-Gorsky also designed an ingenious light-projection system which combined the three images on a screen resulting in a full-colour picture.

these photos made over 100 years ago is exceptional even by today’s standards.

The Library of Congress, which acquired the collection, digitised the glass plates in 2000 and subsequently commissioned composite colour images, bringing Prokudin-Gorsky’s images to viewers in the digital age. ☐

Above: Said Mir Mohammed Alim Khan (1880–1944), the last emir of Bukhara, in a portrait taken in 1911. The Emirate of Bukhara became a Russian protectorate in 1868, and was overthrown by the Red Army in 1920. Alim Khan went into exile and eventually settled in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Left: Tillia Kari from Registan Square, Samarkand. A large school complex built in 1646–60, consisting of three madrasah (religious schools) in the centre of Samarkand (a city in present-day Uzbekistan). Although much damaged, the façades still show intricate ceramic

decoration in geometric and botanical motifs, as well as panels with PersoArabic inscriptions above the door of each cell. The corner minaret displays geometric tile patterns with block Kufic script forming words from the Kalima, the Islamic declaration of faith.

Above: Prokudin-Gorsky’s photo process involved taking three successive monochrome photographs, each through a different coloured filter. This photo is flooded with yellow because the blue glass negative was broken, revealing the inner workings of the technique.

w-t-w.co/mjd

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Pete Guest is a journalist and editor writing about the environment, human rights and economic development. He wrote about the Brixton pound in the previous issue of WTW, and Mars exploration in No.4.

NUTCRACKERS Along the edge of the Amazon rainforest, the mulheres quebradeiras or ‘women who break nuts’ fight for the right to harvest and process a valuable natural resource using traditional methods that are still far more effective than modern technologies.

‘I was born a quebradeira, 65-year-old Nazare Naza says. ‘I was born breaking nuts, I still break nuts. That’s what I learned as a child, breaking nuts in a field. And thank God I did.’

In the yard behind her brick-and-adobe house on the outskirts of Imperatriz, Maranhão in northeast Brazil, Naza has a lean-to shelter covering a stove; next to it is a large pile of dark nuts, each about the size of a tennis ball, cocos de babaçu, which grow on the babaçu palm tree indigenous to the region.

Naza sits, legs splayed, holding an axe on the ground with its blade pointing upwards. Placing a nut on the edge of the blade, she delivers two sharp whacks to the shell with a wooden baton, then spins the nut and strikes again. The shell falls neatly in two. Another whack and it is in Women break nuts in a patch of babaçu forest owned by the Catholic Church near Imperatriz, in Brazil’s Maranhão state. Access to the nuts that fall

four, and Naza plucks the tiny kernel, intact, from the centre.

It takes 225 kg (500 lb) of force to crack a coco de babaçu, and it is a precise task.

Experienced quebradeiras—nut breakers—can dismantle the nut in under a minute, their fingers dangerously close to the sharp blade and the darting baton. It is a skill that is tightly woven into their sense of identity and community, a sense which has bound them together during decades of human rights conflicts, supported them in lean economic times and rooted them to the land.

Today they are facing a new fight, as northeast Brazil becomes the focus of an agro-industrial initiative that threatens to sweep away their forests and their livelihoods. In response, the

from the babaçu palm trees is often a flashpoint for the quebradeiras women’s movement and a crystallisation of the tensions between the rural poor and the

agro-industrialists who own huge areas of Brazil. All photos: Pete Guest

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quebradeiras, both old and young, are organising, protesting and modernising to make the political, social and economic case for preserving the babaçu forests.

The cocos de babaçu are a vital part of a culture that predates the colonial period by centuries.

Indigenous communities taught the use of the nut to Portuguese settlers and to the quilombolas, former slaves who escaped into the forests. The kernel is roasted and crushed for its oil, which is used in cooking, soap and cosmetics. The white pith or ‘mesocarp’ inside the nut is pounded into a nutritious flour to make porridge, while the shell is burned for charcoal.

Babaçu palm forests spread for miles across the ecological belt between the rainforest and the savannah. They are thickset trees, rising on heavy trunks to splayed fern-like leaves, hung with clusters of nuts that look like giant bunches of grapes. In some municipalities, quebradeiras have the right—often hard won—to access babaçu palms wherever they grow; in others they simply go anyway.

The quebradeiras have a deep emotional attachment to the babaçu that verges on kinship.

They call the young trees ‘children’, and older trees ‘grandmothers’, and they say that the trees have a lifecycle that mirrors their own, becoming productive in their late teens and bearing fruit until they are around 40 years old. The anthropomorphism lends an extraordinary pathos to their stories of conservation and conflict with landowners and ranchers who cut down the trees or spray them with pesticide, ‘poisoning the children’.

The importance of the babaçu, however, is more than sentimental. The nuts have often meant the difference between starvation and survival for rural communities living under the quasi-feudal system that persisted in Brazil into the 1980s. Until populist land reform policies started to give rural communities power and rights, huge areas of the country were given over to wealthy ranchers and farmers who had near-total economic control over the people who lived and worked in the countryside. Tenant farmers had to work for landowners, often for free, as well as pay rent in crops. Collecting and breaking the cocos de babaçu for sale or domestic use afforded at least some scant breathing space to families below the poverty level.

WTW #6

Babaçu oil is a highly valued commodity locally, selling for between 8 and 12 reais (€1.80– 2.70 or US$2.00–3.00) per litre. It was also once a major export product for Brazil (this in spite of the fact that attempts to mechanise the production process have largely failed, and the only reliable way of achieving a clean separation of the kernel from the shell is the traditional technique of the quebradeiras). During and between the World Wars, the global powers competed for the rights to buy up the crop to mitigate a shortage of edible oils back home. It is only over the last two decades that it has fallen out of national development plans, according to Professor Alfredo Wagner from Maranhão State University, who says that even in the 1980s the military junta that ruled the country drew up maps of the babaçu forests to better understand their economic value.

Today, the Brazilian government faces a slowdown in economic growth due to the collapse in Chinese demand for its minerals. Its solution is a massive expansion of its agro-industries, the soy, timber and palm oil plantations that have created huge wealth across the nation, often at the expense of its ecology and indigenous communities.

A new initiative, named MATOPIBA after the four states that it will encompass, Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia, intends to redraw the agro-industrial frontier, setting aside 73 million hectares (281,850 sq. mi) of land for development. Of that, 27 million hectares (104,250 sq. mi) is babaçu forest, which the government has declared ‘secondary forest’, distinct from the Amazonian ‘primary forest’ that it has promised to protect. The babaçu are barely acknowledged on the official maps and plans documenting the programme.

MATOPIBA’s architect, Brazil’s agriculture minister Katia Abreu, a former rancher nicknamed ‘the Chainsaw Queen’, has become a hate figure amongst the quebradeiras, and they are firing up their old networks to protest and organise. As María do Socorro Teixeira Lima, a firebrand quebradeira activist, told a meeting in the Maranhão state capital of São Luis: ‘We’re ready to kick Katia’s arse. We’re ready.’

They are doing more than just making noise.

More than 900 quebradeiras and community members across the four states of MATOPIBA

Nutcrackers

Above: The babaçu kernels are cleaned before oil is extracted in the processing centre.

Below: In Esperantina, in Piauí, Brazil, a cooperative of quebradeiras has turned

79

harvesting the ‘mesocarp’, or pith of the babaçu into an industry. Their factory, which buys nuts from local women and produces high-quality flour, is based in a house once occupied by one of the brutal ‘gaucho’ landlords, who ran his

estate on a feudal system. Today, the cooperative hopes to prove that they can drive regional economic development themselves, without the government selling off their land and forests for large-scale agriculture.

80

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Across the state, and neighbouring ones, people will confide—some proudly, some sotto voce—that their mothers were quebradeiras, and often that they, themselves, know how to crack the nut.

Francisca Rodrigues dos Santos selling bottles of babaçu oil, highly valued nondrying edible oil used to make products such as medicines, beauty aids, and beverages. This oil has properties similar to coconut oil.

have worked with Wagner at Maranhão State University to map the babaçu forests from the ground up, disputing the official maps that have erased their livelihoods from the records. At the same time, they are working on creating a compelling case for embracing nut breaking as a creator of jobs and wealth by modernising the processing stage, rejecting the government’s vision of development in favour of one of their own.

As Francisca da Silva Nascimento, the coordinator of the largest national movement of quebradeiras, the Interstate Movement of the Babaçu Nut Breakers, Movimento Interestadual das Quebradeiras de Coco Babaçu, says, ‘We aren’t against development. We just want a development that lets us keep our livelihoods and our dignity.’

On the outskirts of Esperantina, a small town in Piauí, a quebradeira cooperative is building on the infrastructure that was once used to oppress the rural poor. Into the 1980s, the house that now forms their meeting rooms and kitchen was occupied by a local rancher who extracted extortionate rents from the families that lived on his land, demanded that men labour unpaid on his fields and sponsored violence against anyone who agitated for rights. Seventy-fiveyear-old quebradeira Francisca Rodrigues dos

Santos remembers going to the house to sell nut kernels to him, being paid in chits that could only be exchanged at a store he owned. She also recalls, with a mischievous gleam in her eye, the moment when the women discovered their landlord was himself a mere squatter on the land.

The cooperative has built a small processing facility attached to the old house, its tiled walls still gleaming white. Inside, blades, huge pestles and mortars, grinders and an industrial oven are used to produce mesocarp flour for packaging and branding. The cooperative collects nuts from local quebradeiras, processes them, sells the product and pays back to its members. It has already won contracts to supply the local school system, and they are bidding for bigger deals.

The last generation of quebradeiras, politically potent as they were, were largely uneducated.

Their children are economists, agronomists and businesswomen, their education paid for by the cocos de babaçu, with one foot in their mothers’ traditions, the other in Brazil’s modern economy.

‘It’s true that in the past, people used to hide that they broke nuts. We had no status, but it was how you bought food, medicine, clothing,’ Nascimento, 33, says. ‘Now, we’re recognised.

It’s an identity. I’m proud to be a quebradeira de coco.’ ☐

w-t-w.co/crk

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Tim Maly, a Canadian writer in Cambridge, usually writes about the distant future, and contributed Message For the Future to WTW No.3.

THE LANGUAGE OF COLOURS The Munsell Color System catalogues the broad range of colours perceivable by the human eye and reproducible by imaging technology. Its colour space is based not on theoretical ideals, but on empirical observation of what the average person can actually see.

‘Do you see the same red as me?’ It may seem like a strange question, perhaps the musing of a child or philosopher trying to understand the nature of perception and reality. But it may be a serious enquiry from a brand manager trying to ensure visual consistency across a product line. Coke red, after all, is different from BBC red, Canon red, Levi’s red, LG red, Red Cross red and so on.

In 1905, American painter and inventor Albert Henry Munsell illustrated the problem

by quoting a letter to London from Robert Louis Stevenson who was trying to furnish his Samoan home.

‘For a little work-room of my own at the back I should rather like to see some patterns of unglossy—well, I’ll be hanged if I can describe this red. It’s not Turkish, and it’s not Roman, and it’s not Indian; but it seems to partake of the last two, and yet it can’t be either of them, because it ought to be able to go with vermilion.

82

Previous page: Three dimensional colour charts developed by Albert Munsell in the early 1920s. Courtesy of the Hagley Museum & Library.

WTW #6

Above: Munsell introduced his system in 1913 with the publication of the Atlas of the Munsell Color System, which featured 15 colour charts consisting of several hundred colour chips arranged according to the three characteristics of

Ah, what a tangled web we weave! Anyway, with what brains you have left choose me and send me some—many—patterns of the exact shade.’

What was needed, Munsell realised, was a system for communicating colours precisely.

He likened the need for a colour notation to the need for musical notation: a standardised system for representing pitches, rhythms and dynamics enables a tune written by one person to be reliably reproduced by another person. Munsell hoped that a system that could notate hue, value and chroma (parameters roughly equivalent to the better-known hue, lightness and saturation) would usher in a new age of chromatic literacy.

The system he developed, described in A Color Notation in 1905, and demonstrated by the Atlas of the Munsell Color System in 1915, remains in use (with refinements) to this day.

There are, of course, several such systems.

RGB and CMYK allow (properly calibrated)

hue, value, and chroma, corresponding to dominant wavelength, brightness, and strength or purity respectively.

The system is used internationally for specifying opaque colours of dyed or pigmented surfaces.

monitors and printers to reproduce the colours of screen and print images, while products like the Pantone System index colours to standards that can be shared across industries.

And although Munsell predates these, it is still used by the United States Geological Survey to describe soil colours, as well as by some brewers, dentists, artists, and manufacturers looking to colour-match their products.

To be sure, Munsell was not the first to attempt to codify a catalogue of colours, but earlier systems tended to be based on idealised solids such as cones, spheres, cylinders, or cubes, limiting their usefulness in the real world.

Munsell’s system is based on two highly practical factors: the first being the empirically determined parameters of human colour perception.

Munsell conducted a series of painstaking experiments that involved presenting test subjects with spinning discs covered by different

The Language of Colours

The three-dimensional Munsell colour tree. Albert Henry Munsell discovered that if hue, value and chroma were to be kept perceptually uniform, achievable surface colours could not be forced into

83

a regular shape. In this model, colour samples are mounted radially on vertical semicircular plastic plates. These show changes in colour hue around the circular axis, while colour saturation

ratios of coloured areas to determine which seemed equally dark/light/dull/rich, ensuring that every swatch of colour would be perceived by the average observer as being the same. Based on this data, Munsell constructed a ‘tree’ with hues arranged in a wheel of colours, red to yellow to green to blue to purple and back to red (with

increases outwards, and brightness from top to bottom.

Photo courtesy of Getty/Reporters.

half steps YR, GY, BG, PB, RP between), values arranged in ten steps up the trunk from black to white, and chromas radiating outward from least to most saturated with no upper limit.

This is the slice of the tree that reveals 7.5 Yellow and 7.5 Purple-Blue, generated by the Munsell DG iPad app:

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Albert Henry Munsell and his family observing the Munsell colour sphere in motion. Munsell devised the first system

WTW #6

for numerically describing colours based on the parameters of human colour perception.

Notice that there are far more distinguishable yellows than blues in the brighter values and more blues than yellows in the dark. The smaller squares represent colours that exist in the Munsell system but that can’t be accurately displayed on the iPad’s RGB screen. (In converting from the screen to CMYK print, even further distinction has been lost.)

The second practical factor in the Munsell system is the range of capabilities afforded by existing print and dye technologies. In other words, for a colour to make its way into the atlas, it must be not only humanly perceivable, but also reliably reproducible. Today, creating the

Photo courtesy of the Hagley Museum & Library.

1,600 individual colours for the comprehensive Munsell Book of Color, Glossy Edition takes 25 to 30 colourants, says Art Schmehling, Munsell Product Manager at X-Rite. Sometimes, the range of colours in the book has expanded thanks to the discovery of new pigments. At other times it has contracted, for example as industry turned away from the vibrant but toxic pigments based on heavy metals.

As a result, the Munsell Color Tree has a pleasingly irregular shape generated through a negotiation between human perception and the materials we have available to make colours. ☐

The Language of Colours

85

Environmental scientist Brent Macolley assessing soil using Munsell for soil classification. When examining the soils on site, a small soil sample is taken and each layer is characterised by its structure, texture and colour. The Munsell Color book is used to identify the dominant colour within a particular layer, as well as other colours that appear in each layer. The soil characterisations help in determining an ideal site for creating a wetland.

Photo courtesy of Munsell Color.

The National Cheese Institute’s Color Standards uses a version of Munsell system with 12 colour chips intended for the visual colour grading of cheese. Cheddar should have a colour between 6 and 8, Monterey Jack cheese a colour not darker than 2. The Munsell colour system helps to establish colour standards for a variety of items such as cheese, bacon, milk, chocolate, oil, sugar, porcelain, wood and even lunar soil.

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